The great circle of life. Life feeds upon life/death to produce life almost everything evenually gets recycled. Like to play with numbers? Follow this esimate..
With each inhaled breath, we hold about 6 liters of air within our lungs and circulatory system. No matter what gas we're talking about, at STP that gas will occupy 22.4 lites per mole. That means there are 6/22.4 =.268 moles of gas sitting in our lungs at any given time. The unit of moles is actually an ingenious measure of the number of atoms. One mole contains 6.022e23 atoms. Or 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.
So within each breath we have .268 x 6.022e23 = 1.61e23 molecules of gas in our lungs or...
16,100,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules.
Our breathing rate changes a lot, but on average its about 1 breath every five seconds, or 12 breaths a minute, or 720 breaths an hour, or 17280 breaths a day or 6,307,200 breaths a year, and if we live for 32 years that gives us 201,830,400 breaths in his lifetime. How many atoms? multiply 2.02e8 total breaths x 1.61e23 molecules per breath to get a total of 3.25e31 total molecules.
32,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules. The total mass of the atmosphere is estimated to be 5.3e21 grams. We know that 99% of the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen. The percentage corrected amount for each molecule is about 28.56 grams per mole of atmosphere. In essence there are 5.3e21 / 28.56 = 1.86e20 moles of gas in our atmosphere. 1.86e20 moles x 6.022e23 molecules= 1.12e44 molecules in our atmosphere or... 112,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules.
This number of gas particles is constantly changing though, because gases are always being recycled, flung off into space, created or stored via chemical reaction, etc. But in the best possible circumstance, let's guess that most of those air molecules remained airborn. We can also assume that 2000 years worth of atmospheric mixing will have dispersed the molecules up enough, so your chances of encountering one remain pretty uniform no matter where you stand.
When we divide 3.25e31 by 1.12e44 (total number of air molecules in our atmosphere) we get 2.91e-11%. Or .000000000000291% Small percentages are pretty hard to understand, so when we take the inverse of 2.91e-11% we realize that there is 1 molecule of air he breathed for every 3.45e12 air molecules on earth. A.K.A. each air molecule has a 1 in 3,450,000,000,000 chance that it once passed through the lungs of a man that lived 2000 years ago. Seems like a pretty small chance but you still have to remember that you're not breathing one molecule of air at a time, your breathing 1.61e23 molecules of air at a time. 1.61e23 molecules per breath x 2.91e-11% = 4,685,100,000,000 molecules that were once within lungs of a Nazarene carpenter.
, but is that 'fatal' or 'faecal' results?
