I think I heard a long time ago someone say like “every glass of water contains water molecules from the pee of benjamin franklin” or something to illustrate the scale of how many atoms there are in things. Is this true? Has so much pee hit all water sources that everything you drink from anywhere was once pee?
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Not really, no. And it isn’t just the water.
Even “in the wild”, urine breaks down pretty quickly. It’s not exactly made up of super long lasting compounds. Urea, the only one that’s really concentrated in urine, breaks down fast at room temperature.
But, even if someone peed up creek from you twenty feet, and you took a giant slurp of the creek water just in time for the contents of their bladder to have traveled that far, you might not get any of it. You’re talking about maybe as high as 25 grams in the typical bladder full. That’s then being slowly mixed with the creek water as it passes. So, out of those hundreds of gallons sweeping by, there’s still only a tiny chance that any of that approximate pint or so of urine would be in your mouth.
Another twenty feet, and unless you buy into homeopathy, the urine’s non water content is essentially diluted so far that you wouldn’t be likely to get even a single molecule.
And that’s if you’re drinking water right out of the creek.
We don’t, usually. Most of the water we drink is treated, and that treatment breavks down even the stable components of urine, usually precipitating them out or converting them into another form. And, again, that assumes your water is coming from a source that would get pee in it.
But, beyond that into the Ben Franklin aspect. No. Not even close. No single person peed enough in their entire lifetime that the actual water molecules are so perfectly distributed across all water sources as to guarantee that.
Now, if you factor in everything that ever peed? Yeah, there’s a good chance that at least one molecule of water in the average glass passed through something that peed it. We’ve got millions of years of critters that excrete waste in a form that could be called urine, hundreds of millions, depending on exactly when you start calling it urine.
In all that time, it’s safe to say that even if it isn’t every single drop of water, a predominance would have been excreted at some point.
This is a silly joke question, and you’re right about the urea breaking down. Now for the water molecules (which are indistinguishable, so outside of pseudoscience the answer is meaningless), it becomes more interesting.
Assuming a person pees about 1l/day, over a lifetime you have on the order of 10^29 water molecules in your pee. There’s about 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water on earth, or about 10^21 litres. So assuming the pee gets perfectly diluted, you get about 10^8 molecules that used to be in a specific person’s pee, per litre of water. In reality it will likely be more, since much water is deep in the ocean, where there is little convection, so it takes long to evenly mix the pee around.
Times that by 8 billions people and that many water molecules have been in any person pee currently alive.
Add in a another billion+ or so people for people who were alive before now and you’ve got even more waterolecules which have been in people’s pee.
Then add in all of the other mammals and vertebrates on earth and you’ve got MORE water molecules which have been in pee before.
That’s a lot of pee.
Not to mention that water molecules are very transitory and break apart and reform all the time.
We are all stardust though.
Yes, and it’s a conscious decision. I’ll ask you not to interrogate, as I get enough shit from my step dad about it already.
I’m more interested in what you’re doing with your step dads shit.
It’s fertilizer for my asparagus garden.
It’s fertilizer for my garden too
Homeopathic levels of Franklin piss.
Water? Never touch the stuff. Fish fuck in it. — W.C. Fields
And we’re breathing dinosaurs!
