But then the fossil methane was made by bacteria decomposing carbohydrates and the carbohydrates were made by plants photosynthesising water and carbon dioxide.
So it all comes from water in the end, but some of it has not been water for hundreds of millions of years!
That is a lot more than I would have guessed. I had thought that we were very slowly leaking precious resources by sending rockets into space, but I guess we're actually still gaining resources on average.
(At least, I don't think we're sending 5000 tons beyond the atmosphere every year).
We create tons of water as a byproduct of many industrial processes, that's "new" water. Of course in the grand scheme of things the quantities are inconsequential, so the statement is probably still generally true...
I'm not a chemist, so I may be totally wrong here, but does a water molecule "care" where the source of its oxygen and hydrogen come from? If you brought oxygen from space, and hydrogen from space, couldn't you then create new water on Earth?
Even pop science fiction like The Martian covered this stuff.
Again, I hope people don't offended as people often do when their knowledge is questioned. You all know stuff that I don't know. I'm just surprised because I thought this was basic stuff everyone knows.
After all, your words were:
> oxygen comes from plants and plants get it from water and the hydrogen comes from hydrocarbon fuels where the hydrogen comes from water again
Then:
> technically you can never create new water on Earth
I asked the questions in good faith, even while knowing that the origin of the individual atoms has no bearing on whether an H2O molecule is H2O or not. I wanted to give you an opportunity to perhaps share something that the rest of us didn't know.
Your response was to ask about my education and how old I was, two data points that I can confidently claim have zero relevance on how water molecules are formed.
> technically you can never create new water on Earth
This is absolutely incorrect. Water can be created on Earth and is being created constantly from various processes. One of those processes: burning any hydrocarbon based fuels (aka, fossil fuels). You can see it for yourself - run any internal combustion engine and you'll see water dripping from the exhaust pipe.
Even burning gasoline creates some new water.
1. Water molecules are not indivisible, of course. Many biological processes will rip apart hydrogen and oxygen, or combine them back together, and have been doing so for billions of years. Industrial processes do the same. So there’s plenty of “new water” from oxygen in the air, etc.
2. New water/oxygen/hydrogen land on earth fairly regularly due to comets, which are usually slushy balls of ice.
Same question for the biological processes you mention.
[1]: https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Biochemistry/Fundamen...
On the other hand, its tough to talk about new water because under thermodynamics, all atoms of the same isotope at the same energy state are completely fungible, so it’s hard to say anything meaningful about the history of a molecule.
Most of the water from metabolism is released in your breath. Water you pee is mostly water you ingested via drinking and eating.
The water that leaves via your lungs and the water that leaves via your kidneys all had to get there via your blood. There's no distinction made based on the "source" of that water.
And the reason for that is that air is bad for heat exchange and transport, water is much better, and evaporates! While the body passively cools in air (either directly when air is colder or via sweat evaporation when air is too hot) most of the heat exchange happens actively via breathing, which is nice because it's easy and quick to adjust, just by breathing faster or slower, so as to maintain 37ish C-100ish F while the body is continuously burning molecules. Without breathing we'd not only lack comburant (oxygen), we'd overheat pretty quickly!
As you mentioned, sweat is also evaporating water, and that is a much more effective way of dumping heat.
It is possible to recycle urine into drinkable water. That’s what they do in international space station where water is very precious.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/wat...
But it's not just sewage though, it's chemicals as well, e.g. from medication, plus whatever else gets flushed.
In Singapore's case the sea is the obvious sink for treated sewage, which kicks it back to desalination. Except that I believe that Singapore's water comes across the causeway to the mainland in a pipe.
This isn't necessary for your point and detracts from it.
It also was a different person ..
They took 7th grade math, but assert that y=mx is meaningless in real life and doesn't help them understand anything they have to deal with
I think you're assigning a moral quality to certain kinds of knowledge that isn't warranted.
I am one of those persons that learned something by reading that comment.
assuming arrogance and sassyness in an otherwise neutral exposition of a true fact, to me means that, as usually happens, arrogance and sassyness are in the eye of the beholder.
arrogance and sassyness are in the eye of the beholder
the former.
I, for example, am not native English speaker, so, for example, in this case should you learn Italian to the point where you are able to successfully convey the information to me, which could be "never"?
> f I prefaced this comment with true facts about how bad your life in particular is, I doubt you'd be ready to read the rest of it :)
you can try, but be ready to fail miserably. Also: I am very well aware how bad my life is, I would say that only an arrogant can think to know it better than me to the point that I will be surprised or shocked.
This + the fact that we've seen microbes come back to life after being frozen in polar ice for millions of years always seems like the most obvious explanation for the origins of cellular life on earth to me.
In other words, what's the chance that the immense complexity of cells did evolve from a molecular soup here on earth VS the chance that it formed somewhere in the universe and found its way here (and many other places)
Water is much stronger than that. It just passes through our processes and will outlast us all.
We are consuming water from places where it has been relatively static, at rates far beyond its natural replenishment rate. THAT'S the issue. Yes, this is a closed system, and the human circulatory system is a closed system. But it's bad if you drain the blood from your brain faster than it is replenished.
It's like saying military burn pits are okay because there may be medical advancements in the future that can be used to treat afflicted soldiers.
I do agree though, if science wasn't verifiable, it would sound like a pyramid scheme.
If you showed today's world to an optimist from a century ago they would see many wondrous things they would never have thought of, but they would also fail to see many of their predicted advancements. And I do think that what optimists predict is usually far more impressive than what actually comes to fruition. That's not to say the pessimists are right, but the optimists simply don't have the track record you seem to think they have.
It is entirely possible with our current level of technology to adjust to the realities of the physical limitations in the world as we know it, without needing to resort to picking “who lives and dies”.
There's a huge difference of usability between different water sources. You can't irrigate your orchards with salt water from the ocean. You can't bathe in waste water from most manufacturing plants. You can't drink ground water that has been contaminated by fracking.
There is a finite amount of potable water. There is a finite amount of usable water for agriculture. Pointing at all of the water on earth and acting as if it's all immediately usable without significant, costly barriers is silly.
The issue isn’t that the water will cease to exist, or that the planet will literally be destroyed. It is that our way of life is unsustainable and actively degrades the future quality of life for us in the future (and our children).
You can compare our mindless pumping of water from the ground to the ignorant farming practices that lead to the dust bowl. If we don’t use our knowledge to take steps to avoid running out of usable water by using it less and more intelligently now, we will come to a hard point in the future.
Which takes cooperation and empathy for everyone’s situations and the overall reality in front of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjDnh7zfO98
"Where did Earth's water come from?"
When we extract crude oil from ground, hydrogen is made as byproduct. Similar with other industrial processes. That hydrogen released in atmosphere burns with oxygen to make water.
So one could say that is new water.
The sun is a big hydrogen ball, and some of the big sun flares may bring new hydrogen atoms to Earth. Which then end up oxidized into water, hence new water.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/Solar_Flare_S....
If we brought water back a container of water from Europa would this be the largest amount of new water entering the earth since planets struck it billions of years ago?
I briefly googled it (I dont know much about this stuff tbh):
> The water on our Earth today is the same water that’s been here for nearly 5 billion years. So far, we haven’t managed to create any new water, and just a tiny fraction of our water has managed to escape out into space. The only thing that changes is the form that water takes as it travels through the water cycle.
Anyway interesting thought experiment.