Flo and Friends by Jenny Campbell for June 05, 2023

you are wiser already

Oh think of all the famous and infamous people whose breath I am breathing. Not sure I want to do that. Some people were really disgusting.

And, I guess , at least one that passed through the Petomane f..ts? Imperious Caesar…

The air of the Boston Strangler could leave you breathless.

Does this assume that Socrates never inhaled the same molecule twice?

I prefer the Charlie Brown quote about dirt:

Charlie Brown: Don’t think of it as dust. Think of it as maybe the soil of some great past civilization. Maybe the soil of ancient Babylon. It staggers the imagination. He may be carrying soil that was trod upon by Solomon, or even Nebuchudnezzar.

Nope, don’t feel any different. Oh, well.

How many brain cells were sacrificed reading that useless trivia?

One molecule of air? The Earth is a closed system so yes, we contain molecules that were in others at some time. The issue is recombination. Air is mostly molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, water molecules, and carbon dioxide. Socrates would have exhaled all of those, but the carbon dioxide would have passed through plants which broke those molecules down and made different oxygen molecules. The oxygen he exhaled would have been inhaled by other animals, including humans, and broken down to make different carbon dioxide molecules, again to be rearranged into different molecules. Likewise plants would use the nitrogen to to make plant material that animals then eat. As for water vapor, I don’t know how frequently water molecules are broken down and recombined into something else so you might inhale a water molecule Socrates exhaled so just hope it didn’t carry any of his mucus.

That molecule has to be pretty stale by now.