Question:Drink a glass of water and it's likely you're imbibing at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Plato or Aristotle. Wow! Bottoms up!
Answer: Could as well have been Cleopatra or Joan of Arc or Shakespeare or anybody you want to name going back some years, to allow time for the hydrologic cycle to spread the water around the world.
As Professor Lewis Wolpert once explained it, "There are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea," so the historic chain of mouth-to-bladder-to-mouth-etc. follows.
Cherish that H2O you drink, for as noted by the U.S. Geological Survey, water is a renewable but finite resource, cycling through our Earth system via clouds, precipitation, ground water, streams and rivers, oceans, plants and animals. Total planetary water is about 326,000,000 cubic miles, with about 317,000,000 in the oceans, 7,000,000 in icecaps and glaciers and 2,000,000 in subsurface groundwater.
These very rounded numbers allow for the insignificant quantities of water on which all of our lives depend: 30,000 cubic miles in freshwater lakes, 25,000 in saline lakes and inland seas, 16,000 in soil moisture, 3,000 in the atmosphere, 300 in rivers and streams.
So savor that next sip—before you pass it on!
Question: The "good old days this," the "good old days that," people will say. How good really were the "good old days"?
Answer: Just a century ago there was no indoor plumbing, most people's education was limited, women faced restricted opportunities, children labored in mines, no social safety net existed, trivial infections by today's standards sometimes proved fatal, we generated less electricity each year than we now consume in a day, recaps David Myers in "Social Psychology."
In a "time experiment" in 1999, Britain's Channel 4 network selected Joyce and Paul B. from among 450 applicants to spend three months with four of their children living the middle-class life of 1900. Yet after just a week of rising at 5:30 a.m., preparing food as the Victorians did, wearing corsets, shampooing with a mixture of egg, lemon, borax and camphor, and playing parlor games by evening gaslight, the B.s were close to quitting. They endured but saw the romantic appeal of Victorian novels and movies evaporate.
"On sheer material grounds, today's working class enjoy luxuries — electricity, hot running water, flush toilets, TV, transportation — unknown to royalty of centuries past."
The down side of all this, says Myers, is that we are overloading the Earth's carrying capacity and must quickly find ways to curtail rampant consumption or face ecological disaster.
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich atstrangetrue@compuserve.com, coauthors of "Can a Guy Get Pregnant? Scientific Answers to Everyday (and Not-So-Everyday) Questions," from Pi Press.