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Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by tredre3 on Thursday September 21, 2023 @07:10PM (#37605700)
> The water on our Earth today is the same water that’s been here for nearly 5 billion years.

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...

Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by frogulis on Thursday September 21, 2023 @07:18PM (#37605769)
Is it truer to say "the hydrogen and oxygen on our Earth today are the same [...] 5 billion years"?
Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by ghayes on Thursday September 21, 2023 @08:16PM (#37606253)
If those hydrogen and oxygen atoms had not previously been bonded into H2O, you would have to say this is “new” water, right?
Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by prawn on Thursday September 21, 2023 @08:40PM (#37606448)
Water of Theseus!
Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by foota on Thursday September 21, 2023 @10:39PM (#37607232)
What if they bonded with different atoms? To get truly duplicate water it would need to find its partner(s, who knew water was poly), I suspect the odds are low :-)
Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by namirez on Thursday September 21, 2023 @08:30PM (#37606363)
Except water is H2O where the oxygen comes from plants and plants get it from water and the hydrogen comes from hydrocarbon fuels where the hydrogen comes from water again. So technically you can never create new water on Earth but you can bring in more from the space.
Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by buffington on Thursday September 21, 2023 @09:26PM (#37606752)
> Except water is H2O where the oxygen comes from plants and plants get it from water and the hydrogen comes from hydrocarbon fuels where the hydrogen comes from water again

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?

Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by globular-toast on Friday September 22, 2023 @02:57AM (#37608774)
Of course it doesn't care. Man... I'm not expecting everyone to be a chemist, I'm certainly not, but how do people on Hacker News not know this stuff? I ask this with genuine curiosity. How old are you and what's your education?

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.

Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by buffington on Friday September 22, 2023 @11:43AM (#37613514)
Perhaps I misunderstood your original comment. I interpreted what you said as meaning that the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make up an H2O molecule had to be derived from H2O molecules.

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.

Re:NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s m... by namirez on Friday September 22, 2023 @07:26PM (#37619092)
Please pay more attention to the user names.