Every time I drink a glass of water, I must ask myself how old this water must be. It has been here since God created this universe. Did God send it to earth from some dying star? Where did it come from? Eureka, I believe I have come up with an interesting thought while reading a High German novel by Rebecca Gable’. The oldest drink in the universe, and God, our Lord and Savior, made it. I do hope you will join me in this topic.
As my name is not Baron Victor von Frankenstein, I assure you this will be a Thriller better than any other yet!
Post Scriptum: I was once in Frankenstein, Germany. Really and a ruined castle is there too!
Actually, Henry, some of the water molecules in that last glass of water you drank would have only been milli-seconds old (the equilibrium between H and OH ions dissociating and reassociating again). Some of it would be newly minted water from all the reactions happening all over the earth (any combustion, whether from a car engine, a forest fire, or your body burning your lunch). So that’s a lot of water mixed into the hydrosphere that isn’t that old at all. And other water molecules are “destroyed” by being used up in other reactions (photosynthesis). So it isn’t a static situation where the earth got x amount of water all in the past which it has been stuck with ever since. But many of those “original” water molecules would surely still be around from those deep eons of time, and that is rather fun to think about. I’ve wondered how long a time it would take for a given puddle of water, if it were allowed to entirely evaporate to become evenly dispersed throughout the hydrosphere. A month? year? ever? I guess deep ocean waters can actually take thousands of years to get mixed in with upper waters, so that makes it sound like some water molecules get to “hang out” in their special niches for millennia unmolested. So if I put a drop of red food coloring in the ocean at one point, I shouldn’t expect that drop to be evenly dispersed through the oceans in anything close to my lifetime.
