How Has the Earth’s Entire Water Supply Not Already Been Exhausted?

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There are currently about 7 billion people on the planet, all of which require water to survive. Even without the direct consumption of water, water is usually in most other beverages that people consume. Also, many of these billions of humans use massive amounts of water everyday to do laundry, bathe, wash dishes, and so forth. Many animals require water to survive as well.

Also, humans and animals requiring frequent water consumption has been a thing for billions of years. Obviosuly Earth’s water supply is not infinite. How have we not already exhausted all the water the Earth has to offer?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You all are right, of course, but have missed perhaps a more convincing direction for explanation: We are small and the earth is big.

There is a lot of water in earth. See. https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question157.htm, where the estimate is 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, (multiply by four for liters – 1.3 times 10 to the 21 liters. Dividing by the US figure of 1,200 kL per year one gets an extremely low calculation of approximately 1 times 10 to the 15 or 1,000,000,000,000,000 people-years of water.

Dividing this by the 7 billion people in the world figure, used already, one gets a bit over 10 billion years. So, it would take the current 7 billion people in the world about 10 billion years to consume the water in the world.

If one assumed that perhaps 100 billion people have been born, most died as infants, but perhaps having an average lifespan of 20 years, one still has humans consuming 1/5,000,000 of the water on the earth, unless I missed something.

Note, again, this calculation assumed the highest current water consumption for the entire world and over all time – a extremely gross overstatement.

Bottom line, even if water disappeared when people or people’s technology used water, we are insignificant, compared to the volume of water on earth.

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