7 ms·

Aside from water created through burning Hydrogen and Oxygen I just assumed all the water I have ever consumed was the same water consumed by billions of animal

Aside from water created through burning Hydrogen and Oxygen I just assumed all the water I have ever consumed was the same water consumed by billions of animals, humans and plants and then excreted out back into the environment to be filtered by the earth or atmosphere and then I drink it again and again. Is that a gross way to think about it?

lab14 4y ago
There's a song in Spanish called "Mi Agüita Amarilla" by "Los Toreros Muertos"[1] who basically tells the story of a guy who drank 40 beers and then proceeds to describe how his pee is transformed into water again to be drank by cows, people and the fish that you eat, to then ascend to the atmosphere to rain down on schools and your house. This song haunted me back when I was a kid and learned about the water cycle. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jaf1yvWb1jw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jaf1yvWb1jw
xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
I'm no physicist but I'm pretty sure oxygen is the most prevalent element on Earth mass-wise, and hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, so it seems likely that there are a good number of water molecules that have never existed before, and that most (all?) water molecules will not exist indefinitely. A lake can be a lake but that doesn't mean the water is the same water. In any solution, the bonds of water molecules are being continuously rearranged. The odds that any of the water molecules leaving such a solution have any of the atoms they started with are infinitesimal. For the most part, we live in a giant soup of chemistry on this planet. Everything changes all the time, nothing is forever.
VLM 4y ago
Somewhere around one ten millionth of the water you drink is currently ionized. You better hope it is, anyway. Go ask a chemist what pH actually means. Non chemists seem surprised to discover that essentially all water is partially ionized all the time. Anyway my point is if 1e-7 of the water you drink technically is not a water molecule at that instant, you can draw graphs of how much of the water you drink has been ionized at some point in the past, which requires a lot more motivation to determine the kinetics than I'm capable of. So, no, essentially none of the water you drink was recently "pee water" or whatever. Yes technically the individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms have quite an extensive ownership history, but the average "age" of an individual water molecule as three atoms with polar covalent non-ionized bonds is surprisingly low in your average glass of tap water. A decent shoulder shrugging "meh" estimate is figure the water molecules in your average pH 7 tap water are about half a day old. Its a lot more than a couple hours and a lot less than a couple months, that's for sure. The "age" of water in the linked article is how long that bucket was isolated and sealed off from the general ecosystem which conceptually is a different kettle of fish. Or kettle of dissolved isotopes in this case.

lab14 4y ago

There's a song in Spanish called "Mi Agüita Amarilla" by "Los Toreros Muertos"[1] who basically tells the story of a guy who drank 40 beers and then proceeds to describe how his pee is transformed into water again to be drank by cows, people and the fish that you eat, to then ascend to the atmosphere to rain down on schools and your house. This song haunted me back when I was a kid and learned about the water cycle. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jaf1yvWb1jw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jaf1yvWb1jw

xyzzy_plugh 4y ago

I'm no physicist but I'm pretty sure oxygen is the most prevalent element on Earth mass-wise, and hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, so it seems likely that there are a good number of water molecules that have never existed before, and that most (all?) water molecules will not exist indefinitely. A lake can be a lake but that doesn't mean the water is the same water. In any solution, the bonds of water molecules are being continuously rearranged. The odds that any of the water molecules leaving such a solution have any of the atoms they started with are infinitesimal. For the most part, we live in a giant soup of chemistry on this planet. Everything changes all the time, nothing is forever.

VLM 4y ago

Somewhere around one ten millionth of the water you drink is currently ionized. You better hope it is, anyway. Go ask a chemist what pH actually means. Non chemists seem surprised to discover that essentially all water is partially ionized all the time. Anyway my point is if 1e-7 of the water you drink technically is not a water molecule at that instant, you can draw graphs of how much of the water you drink has been ionized at some point in the past, which requires a lot more motivation to determine the kinetics than I'm capable of. So, no, essentially none of the water you drink was recently "pee water" or whatever. Yes technically the individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms have quite an extensive ownership history, but the average "age" of an individual water molecule as three atoms with polar covalent non-ionized bonds is surprisingly low in your average glass of tap water. A decent shoulder shrugging "meh" estimate is figure the water molecules in your average pH 7 tap water are about half a day old. Its a lot more than a couple hours and a lot less than a couple months, that's for sure. The "age" of water in the linked article is how long that bucket was isolated and sealed off from the general ecosystem which conceptually is a different kettle of fish. Or kettle of dissolved isotopes in this case.