CURIOUS> Curious Times! -Every Breath You Take

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Date: 8 Dec 2003 13:11:10 -0000
From: Curious Times <sodamail-gtmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: gleason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Curious Times! -Every Breath You Take


Curious Times
Science Thought and Exploration
---------------------------------------------

What's the chance that in your next breath you will take in some of the same
air your mother breathed out as she gave birth to you?

Years of psychoanalysis aside, its an interesting question.

Turns out that anyone can figure this one out fairly easily thanks to the work
of   lots of folks.  What you've got to do is figure out how much air you 
breath, how
  much air there is in the world, and how long it takes to mix it all up.

The Greeks guessed that everything was made up of small particles, but it
wasn't until the 1800's that several French and Italian scientists figured 
out
that these small particles ­atoms, were arranged into larger groupings
(molecules), and that air was made up of lots of these molecules.

It took people like Leonardo da Vinci dissecting numerous human bodies, in
the name of science, to discover how big our lungs were.

Taking these two pieces of information it turns out you can fit about
200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 nitrogen and oxygen molecules into your
lungs.  To make it easier I'm going to call this number the BIG number.

Okay now how about how much air there is in the world? Well that took until
the 1900's or so to figure out.  Scientists had to know how big the earth was
(that was pretty easy, although the Flat Earth Society still exists) and that
there  was air all the way up to 50 km.  Actually it goes past this, but this 
is the
limit of the Stratosphere ­ which is the layer of air that's fairly stable, and 
past
which  your mother's breath probably hasn't gone.

If you do the math, it turns out that there is a bunch of air molecules in 
the
world ­the actual number is a '20' with 44 zeroes after it.  I'm going to call
this number the HUGE number.

The final piece of information we need is exactly how long it takes to mix 
all
the molecules of your mother's breath with every other breath-sized package
of air on the planet.  This took a bit of work, but thanks to things like ash 
being
blown into the atmosphere from volcanic explosions, and radioactive fallout
from a few accidents, scientists have figured out that it takes about 10 days
for  your breath to mix with the local air (say your county), 1 year to go to 
a
different hemisphere and about 10 years to get into the stratosphere.

So, if you take all the air in the world (the HUGE number), divide it by the 
air
in  your mother's exhausted breath, (the BIG number) you get one of her
molecules in every 20 with 22 zeroes of air molecules (coincidentally the
same as the BIG number).  But since your next breath has 20 with 22 zeroes
of molecules in it you've got nearly a 100% chance of at least one molecule
being your mom's.

This can get stranger.  Your next breath also includes bits of air from 
nearly
everyone who has ever lived, including Julias Caesar's last breath ­ the one
with which he said "Et tu Brute?", Benjamin Franklin's final air used when he
said "Ah, its done" referring to the final draft of the Declaration of
Independence, and air from that huffing fur-clad ancestor leaving home in
Europe 10 thousand years ago heading north?.

Talk about a small world?

Lauren

---------------------------------------------
You can email Scott at scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Also check out Scott's Science for the People Site:
http://www.ScienceForPeople.com

You can email Lauren at
curioustimes@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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