How can we breath water vapour without drowning?

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How can we breath water vapour without drowning?

In: Biology

Anonymous 0 Comments

Water vapour is a very small amount of water in a gaseous form. Gasses spread out as much as they can. The same quantity of liquid water would be very, very small. Typical sea level air has about 1% water vapour, and is about 1/1000th the density of liquid water. So, in 6 litres of air (the average adult male lung capacity) that’d be about 0.06 millilitres of water if it were to be condensed into liquid. That’s so little water that if it were on your desk you probably wouldn’t even be able to see it. The average person sweats out more water than that in a second. So you’ve got an unnoticeable amount of water, that’s also spread out as a vapour, so it’s behaving as a gas, not a liquid. Even if I had got the maths wrong by a factor of 100, ie there was 100 times more water in air than I calculated, that’d still only be 6 millilitres, which would only be enough to induce a short cough at most.