Drinking Dinosaur Pee
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Since on a planetary scale everything is eventually recycled, did you drink dinosaur pee today?
Exploded stars spread matter to be recycled.
O.K, how about pee from fish in the reservoir? Just how recycled is the water we drink and the air we breathe? Is the 5,789th molecule to the left of your heart one that was part of Leonardo Da Vinci? Or someone else, you pick. How small a particle do you feel comfortable sharing with a multitude of people and creatures stretching back in time?
You may recall that matter can neither be created nor destroyed only changed in form, and that the total mass and energy in a system is constant. Clearly then there is some “recycled” material going around! So you need to be O.K. with being composed of recycled material because it is just the way things are put together.
Stars can be thought of as the furnaces that create various elements. That’s where the Carbon we have in us has come from. So too do the other elements come from stars.
Is all this being recycled a good thing?
Back to the dinosaur pee question though. Are actual droplets of pee still floating around? This touches on a question of our perspective and our limitations in terms of our senses. A molecule of water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. One particular molecule in a droplet of water is incredibly small. There are natural processes that break apart such molecules as well as forming them. The recycled nature of matter means that what we see as solid is really only a temporary gathering of elements that will be broken apart and recycled into something else. In a sense we are even more unique than you might have thought!
Yes, you are partially composed of recycled dinosaur.
But we are also composed of recycled forests, recycled mountains, oceans, and the very stuff of stars!