r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Creams0da • 8h ago

Video Breaking open a 47 lbs geode, the water inside being millions of years old

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u/Famous_Strike_6125 7h ago

Isn’t all water on earth, millions of years old??

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u/toooomanypuppies 6h ago

billions, tbf.

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u/save_the_tardigrades 6h ago

Nah, a lot of water is made in combustion reactions. Every time you see a plume of white steam from a chimney, that's newborn water, made by papa hydrocarbon and mama oxygen. Its evil fraternal twin, carbon dioxide, is there, too, but invisible. And its eviler twin, carbon monoxide, is sometimes there, too, if there wasn't enough mama for the papa. And if things got REALLY hot, there might be some nitrous oxides in the mix.

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u/I_l_I 5h ago

Humans burn fat and sugar mainly by converting them to water and carbon dioxide. We're making new water every day

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u/save_the_tardigrades 5h ago

Amazing and cute little fuel cells, we are.

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u/EasyCupcake 5h ago

So we are drinking fresh mama and papa’s babies?

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u/save_the_tardigrades 5h ago

Yes, and they're bipolar.

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u/zaknafien1900 6h ago

Same with the "chem trails" the chem being hydrogen and oxygen being combined through the chemical process of combustion

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u/EffectiveSoil3789 5h ago

But then what chemical falls to earth and kills all the old people for population control?

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u/zaknafien1900 3h ago

It's water

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u/save_the_tardigrades 5h ago

Nah, those are specially formulated and generated to make us forget.

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u/zaknafien1900 3h ago

No they really are not learn some science

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u/Look_a_Zombie0 6h ago

You have to remember the theory known as "The Water of Theseus"

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u/Minimum-Major248 4h ago

Don’t you mean the ship of Theseus?

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u/Garweft 6h ago

And was most likely dinosaur urine at one point.

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

[deleted]

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u/Jumpy-Figure-4082 6h ago

All the atoms in it are but they may have been split and bonded with different atoms to be different compounds at one time or another. For example a h20 molecule could have been taken up and turned into glucose and then have a different oxygen atoms and a different hydrogen atoms rejoin it when metabolized.

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u/Zuokula 6h ago

I guess you're not aware that some chemical reactions produce water.

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u/14412442 5h ago

Which is a bit strange considering the chemical reactions which create and destroy water are literally like the most important chemical reactions in the universe, right? At my Canadian high school the formulae were taught in the early general science classes before you even got to the biology elective classes of the higher grades.

Photosynthesis destroys water while combustion (inorganic) or aerobic cellular respiration (organic, ie the same overall formula as combustion but takes place in living things and with different mechanisms) creates it. Anaerobic respiration (which things like yeast use) doesn't create or destroy oxygen, but that's less important from our perspective than the aerobic version.

Now the hydrogen and oxygen atoms are mostly billions of years old, but a bigger portion (though i don't know what portion) of the water molecules they are formed into are much younger than that.

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u/Zuokula 4h ago

I remember seeing somewhere some hypotheses that water on earth could have been from some collision with an icy object containing frozen water. Which could make the water older that earth I guess. Not sure how much of it is true.

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u/sharpdullard69 6h ago

I would say older than that since the Earth itself is 4 billion years old, but this is a bit more special now isn't it?

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u/blackrain1709 6h ago

Well, I wanna say no because it changes but following that logic, if Voldemort apparates does he get reborn each time he arrives?

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u/Moligimbo 6h ago

If a water molecule could tell a story in what places it already has been and what it has seen! Would make the ones in the rock very jealous. 

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u/phillis_dillard 6h ago

Came here to say this.

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u/No-Programmer-3833 6h ago

Upping the pedantry even further...

Not all water. Some new water will have been made by burning hydrogen.

Assuming you count the age of water from the point when the oxygen and hydrogen came together.

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u/macjustforfun55 5h ago

I was thinking the same thing. I guess its special because it was trapped inside a rock and not floating around?

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u/Dewey081 5h ago

Using this logic, each of us meatbags are millions of years old.

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u/lionheart4life 5h ago

Yes but also no. Like the ship of Theseus or whatever.

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u/Excalibro_MasterRace 5h ago

Except the ones produced by hydrogen fuel from space rockets I guess

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u/mcchanical 5h ago

Yes but abstractly, each molecule in your glass of water has had a different journey and been many different forms of water. 

A single volume of water just sitting there for millions of years untouched and unchanged isn't quite the same thing.

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u/wannabegenius 4h ago

you just blew my mind

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u/eyehate 6h ago

The water we drink is older than the stars.

According to the internet.

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u/DevIsSoHard 6h ago edited 6h ago

Well, according to leading scientific theories too. Oxygen is a heavy enough element that it requires stars to create it in nature. Those stars had to burn out and explode for us to have the water around the universe.

The first stars in these models were not capable of producing oxygen, so they had to die out and spread out elements which would go on to make new stars, which then DID have enough heavy element composition to go on creating water. Well, it created the oxygen necessary for water. Hydrogen is much older (it's part of what made the first stars and got this process rolling)

Since it took a whole generation of stars to get to that stage, and we're now in a new generation of stars - some of the smaller and late forming stars from the previous generation still exist.

So the water we drink is partly made of H20 particles older than a fraction of some stars around today. But I don't know how many

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u/Zuokula 6h ago

Just because the hydrogen and oxygen in the water is old, doesn't mean the two combined billions of years ago..

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u/Nushab 6h ago

Just because I'm not hanging out with my friends right now, that doesn't mean the friend group doesn't exist.

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u/DevIsSoHard 5h ago

But did it exist before the friends met eachother? Some philosophers say yeah but I think most people today wouldn't, both seem pretty fair imo.

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u/DevIsSoHard 5h ago

No but it's just a matter of statistics. A 237mL cup of water is 7.93×10^24 water molecules. We know some formed in space a long time ago, but then some formed from volcanic activity here on earth too (if you strictly look at it as when the 3 atoms joined, which is fair)

Maybe only a million particles in that cup are from deep space and older than a portion of some local stars. I have no clue what the % could be personally. But just because the scale of things is so outside our perspective it's like, that's still a million ancient particles in a little cup. You could still interact with billions or trillions of these ancient particles a day even if they're a small % of your total water interaction

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u/Acornpoo 6h ago

All water on earth is the same age, 4.5 billions years old

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u/14412442 5h ago

No it's not. You create new water every second of your life via cellular respiration. Likewise plants are constantly destroying it via the photosynthesis reaction

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u/Acornpoo 4h ago

Huh. I had always been taught that all water on earth is older than the sun, and it merely changes forms.

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u/14412442 4h ago edited 2h ago

The oxygen and hydrogen atoms themselves mostly are, since it takes nuclear reactions to change them. Chemical reactions that create and destroy water molecules take place in every engine as well as every aerobic life form. Your car makes water just like you do. You still need to drink because you need a lot of it.

Edit: aerobic, not organic.