What are the odds of ever coming into contact with the same molecule of water during your lifetime?

Question

My husband and I were debating this. And do your odds vary based on where in the country you live? Such as, does living on the West Coast increase the odds? You might brush your teeth, the water molecule goes down the drain into the Pacific, and then becomes incorporated into a cloud and rains on you??

Answer 1

According to:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question157.htm


There are 1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters of Water on earth

In Every liter, there are (6.023 x 10^23molecules * 1000g/18g H2O) = 33461111111111111111111111 molecules of water

That gives us a total of 4.22 x 10^46 molecules (approx) of Water in this world.

Now I assume that A person on average user comes in contact with 20 liters of water everyday (shower, drink, rain, moisture in atmosphere, anything).

Average person's live ~ 70 years.

Total of 70 * 365.25 * 20 = 511350 Liters in a lifetime.

That is ~ 17110339166666666666666666609850 molecures of water

Lets say that the very first water molecule you came in touch with and then let go of it is the one we are interested in. What are the chances that, that particular molecule will visit you again

It has 17110339166666666666666666609850-1 tries to come back to you

which i'll consider just 17110339166666666666666666609850 (becuase its such a huge number, subtracting 1 doesnt matter)

Now out of the 4.22 x 10^46 molecules that molecule has 17110339166666666666666666609850 chances

which means 17110339166666666666666666609850/(4.22 x 10^46) = 4.05 x 10^-16

So chances are Slim. Although I did not consider that if you stay in the same city for long time, and that molecule can hover around there, it has a better chance.

Lets say that kind of scenario gives you 100 times better chance of making a contact (just guessing)

sill your chances are roughly 1 in 2,466,345,032,026,688


Thats all i can think of, hopefully it helps

Answer 2

This is the famous "Jesus' wine phenomeon". The odds are virtually certain that everyone alive today has had some of the water that was in Jesus' wine at his Last Supper. To see why that is, a liter of water has about 55.5 moles of water, or roughly 6 x 10^24 molecules of water if he drank a fifth. The entire world's supply of water, including oceans, is about 1.5 x 10^21 liters. This means that every liter of water in the world today has about 4,000 water molecules that was in the last grail of wine that Jesus drank.

However, if you had a particular molecule of water that you were fond of, and it got lost in the environment, the chances of ever coming in contact with it again is astronomically tiny.

Answer 3

i does no longer say converted particularly. yet one in all my terrific acquaintances and the guitarist for our band now did no longer comprehend lots in any respect approximately punk or pre-punk as quickly as I met him. He became a reasonably large metallic head, nevertheless is to be honest, yet he had a tricky time appreciating issues that weren't as complicated and rapid and technical as Slayer or Megadeth or Sepaltura, yet by the years considering the fact that music is a vast area of the two our lives we uncovered one yet another to our very own musical tastes. and because then he's extremely discovered that some properly located chords or an undemanding yet catchy progression is worth all the capacity interior the international. in spite of the undeniable fact that he nevertheless examine up on each and every thing and is ridiculously solid at guitar of any form, the music he writes himself is very quite often a funky riff or progression and his CD series has a reasonably large punk element to it. And in tunr i've got taken a liking to three of his metallic, in spite of the undeniable fact that I nevertheless can not stand something with grotesque gruff vocals, like Sepultura or that kind of concern. I even have although taken an unusual liking to the CD Reign In Blood by ability of Slayer, do no longer comprehend why.

Answer 4

I will answer this question taking the case of INDIA and that too DELHI. suppose u live in delhi, india and the water u used goes thru the sewage to drains and then to some river and ultimately to bay on bengal in "the hind ocean" there it gets evaporated and cloud is formed. 99.99% it will rain in the middle of reaching to delhi or above the ocean itself or it will not convert into clouds.
so odds in favour of reching the same molecules of water which were used by delhi over delhi are just 0.01% and from this your getting in conatct with same molecule is 0.00015% of this.(as delhi population is above 15 million)..so overall odds become 0.00000015%..THis is my answer..

Answer 5

couldn't begin to do the math. on a related note however is Caesar's last breath.

http://www.hk-phy.org/articles/caesar/caesar_e.html

Answer 6

Highly probable if you have no more variables than stated.