How To Drink Lava

Summary

The Rest Is Science – "How To Drink Lava"

Hosts: Professor Hannah Fry & Michael Stevens (Vsauce)
Date: November 25, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this vibrant and surprising episode, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens dive deep into one of the internet’s strangest questions: How to drink lava? Along the way, they explore what water really is, whether it qualifies as "wet," how water's properties shape life and culture, why water is both everywhere and incredibly rare, and how everything we consume is partially—if not mostly—lava in disguise. Expect a lively journey through chemistry, geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and even linguistics, filled with the hosts’ characteristic wit and curiosity.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The "Is Water Wet?" Debate

[03:01-04:00]

• Michael opens with the classic internet question: Is water wet?
• Michael: "One molecule of water? Dry. Once there's more, it's soaking wet."
• Wetness, they conclude, is about water adhering (via intermolecular forces) to something—sometimes even itself!
• Hannah: "We should say first about why this is a memed question...water itself makes things wet, but is the water itself wet?"

What’s In the Water We Drink?

[04:40-11:31]

• Even "pure" drinks are mostly water—Michael notes Diet Coke is about 99% water, while regular Coke is 90%.
• Tap water is likened to "a rock smoothie" (Hannah, 06:13) because it contains minerals like calcium, magnesium, and sodium.
• Different mineral contents ("hardness" or "softness" of water) drastically impact things like tea and beer.
  • Michael: "There's a theory that New York's Catskills water is what creates for them their unique, special, one of a kind pizza doughs and bagels." (06:33)
  • Replicating local water chemically is used to mass-produce beer and even to solve cases in forensic science and paleontology.

Water as a Geological Time Capsule

[07:43-09:21]

• Water’s mineral content can be traced through human hair, whale ear bones, and even fossils—tracking an organism’s movements or even migration patterns through history.
• Hannah: "You can find a body...take a hair sample and work out what water they were drinking when alive...You can do this with whales as well." (07:43-08:54)

Is Water Actually Lava?

[11:31-13:21]

• Michael makes the bold claim: "A glass of water is actually just a glass of lava."
  • Water ice is technically a mineral; melted ice is "molten rock."
  • Michael: "Ice is a mineral...So melted ice is molten rock: lava. So water is lava." (11:51)
  • Hannah: "They also move the same way...the fluid dynamics of lava is the same as water at that stage." (13:00)

Water’s Remarkable Rarity

[16:11-18:34]

• Of all Earth’s water, only 2.5% is fresh; of that, only 1.2% is surface fresh water accessible to humans and animals.
• Michael: "What we think of as fresh water...in lakes, rivers—that is 0.0072% of all the water on earth." (18:26)

The Power and Mystery of Fridges

[19:43-20:37]

• Fridges are celebrated as miraculous devices that, in just 100–150 years, revolutionized food and drink: “You could have lived...would never have experienced a cold drink.” (Hannah, 20:28)

Earth’s Water Origin Story

[20:37-23:46]

• Most Earth water is “alien,” having arrived via icy comets in the early solar system.
• Over half the water on Earth is older than the Sun itself!
  • Michael: "More than half of the water on Earth is older than the Sun." (21:20)
• Discussion of "heavy water" (with deuterium or tritium): traces in nature, dangerous in quantity.

Drinking Too Much or Too Pure Water

[24:28–28:52]

• Drinking pure water is dangerous because it strips minerals from your body—just like drinking too much mineral water can cause “water poisoning” or "hyponatremia."
• Michael: "If you drink too much water, even water that does have minerals in it, you get confused." (25:25)
• Drinking 6 liters in 3 hours has caused fatalities; for rats, even 40g at once can be fatal.

Recycling Water: Singapore & Space

[28:52–29:57]

• Innovative water recycling in Singapore: sewage is purified and distilled before being reintegrated into systems—often too pure to drink, so it’s sold to semiconductor factories instead.
• The ISS (International Space Station) uses a similar recycling setup: “Yesterday’s coffee is today’s cough coffee.”

Perspective on Earth’s Water Supply

[30:10–31:56]

• If Earth were shrunk to classroom globe size (30cm), all its water would equal less than a tablespoon.
• Michael: "A giant that could hold our Earth...would be like, 'Oh, it's soaking wet.' It’d be like a tiny bit sleepy. Brush it off. Yeah. Oh, it's got a little dew on it." (31:08)

Evolution: We’re Just Water Balloons

[32:28–33:59]

• All life’s evolution is a story of carrying water onto land:
  • Hannah: "We didn't leave the water behind us. All we did was we just turned ourselves into water balloons." (32:28)
• Weight loss overnight is mostly due to evaporation.

Non-Watery Liquids and Everything is Lava

[34:07–35:20]

• Hosts contemplate what other liquids besides water are common at room temperature. Mercury and bromine: toxic. Oils: contain some water.
• Nearly everything drinkable is at least a little bit water—meaning "everything is either olive oil or dinosaur pee." (35:10)

Etymology: Solutions, Losing, and Dissolving

[35:23-36:40]

• Root of “lose” and “solution”: both about dissolving, disappearing, or being lost in water.
  • Michael: “To be a loser is the same as to be dissolved…dissolving to be lost in water.” (35:47)
  • Hannah: “If it wasn’t for losers, we wouldn’t be here. We need dissolved solids in water.” (36:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Michael (03:17): “One molecule of water? Dry. Once there’s more, it’s soaking wet.”
• Hannah (06:13): “Tap water is just... like a rock smoothie.”
• Michael (11:51): “A glass of water is actually just a glass of lava.”
• Michael (18:26): “[Fresh water in lakes and rivers is] 0.0072% of all the water on earth.”
• Hannah (20:28): “It’s wild to me that... most of the planet would never have experienced a cold drink.”
• Michael (21:20): “More than half of the water on Earth is older than the Sun.”
• Hannah (32:28): “We didn't leave the water behind us. All we did was turn ourselves into water balloons...”
• Michael (35:47): “To be a loser is the same as to be dissolved...dissolving to be lost in water.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:01 – Is water wet? (Defining wetness)
• 04:40 – How watery are drinks? (Cola, Diet Cola, alcohol)
• 06:13 – Tap water as a "rock smoothie" (mineral content, food science implications)
• 07:43 – Tracing water’s origin via forensics and whale migration
• 11:31 – Ice as a mineral; water as "lava"
• 16:11 – Global water distribution and scarcity
• 18:26 – Fresh, accessible water: just a fraction of a percent
• 19:43 – Celebration of fridges and cold drinks
• 21:20 – Earth’s ancient, cosmic water
• 24:28 – Dangers of drinking pure or excessive water
• 28:52 – Water recycling in Singapore and in space
• 30:10 – If Earth were a globe, how much water would be visible?
• 32:28 – Evolutionary perspective: humans as “water balloons”
• 35:23 – Linguistics: solution, losing, and dissolving

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Conclusion

Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens transform water from a mundane backdrop to a cosmic, evolutionary, and linguistic wonder—a “loser” (in the best way!) at the heart of every living thing and nearly every drink. Along the way, they break down common misconceptions, drop surprising statistics, and reveal the hidden, geological, and even alien nature of what we gulp down daily. The episode is a lively celebration of science, questioning, and the joy of looking closer at the things that seem most familiar.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[B]

This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, There's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. Hello, and welcome to the Rest Is Science. I am Michael Stevens.

[A]

And I'm Hannah Fry.

[B]

And today we're going to get a little bit splashy, a little bit wet. No, but we are going to talk about something that's wet. Water.

[A]

Hang on. Are you sure water's wet?

[B]

Actually, I'm not so sure.

[A]

This is quite a big question.

[B]

It's a very memed question. Is water wet? I have an opinion on it. Do you?

[A]

I. You tell me yours.

[B]

Okay. What I think is that one molecule of water dry.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Once there's more, it's soaking wet.

[A]

Soaking wet? Yeah. Well, hold on. We should say. We should say first about why this is a memed question. Right. Because it's like water itself. The things that it touches are wet. But is the water itself wet?

[B]

Yes, that's right. Water makes things wet. But water on its own, would you call it wet? I would, because I think water can wet itself. Wetness is about intermolecular forces on water attracting themselves onto some other material.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

That other material, in my opinion, could be another water molecule. So just the surface tension between two water molecules means that they've wet each other.

[A]

So one water molecule. Not wet. Two or more.

[B]

Soaking.

[A]

Soaking wet. Yeah. I'm just having a little sip of my drink here. For those who are listening only. What are you drinking?

[B]

Oh, I'm drinking water.

[A]

I'm also drinking water. Except that mine looks a lot like coffee.

[B]

Mine looks like coffee, too, but it's still about 98% water.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

In fact, everything we drink is basically just flavored water.

[A]

It is just basically flavored water. Just different. Different amounts of flavorings.

[B]

Yeah, we give them totally different names. We say, oh, that's coffee. If someone wanted water and I gave them this, I'd be 98% correct. Because it's basically a bullseye. And yet I'm wrong.

[A]

Are some drinks more watery than others, though? I mean, like Coca Cola, for example, compared to, say, a seltzer.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Seltzer is predominantly water, but it's got some carbon dioxide, maybe some minerals in there. Seltzer technically is only going to have the minerals that came from the taps, whatever that was in the source. Club soda has a lot more minerals, but something like Coca Cola, that's about 90% water. Oh, so that 10% makes a big difference because it's the difference between Coca Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper. But listen to this. Diet Coke is not 90% water. Higher or lower, 99% water.

[A]

Is it?

[B]

It's Basically just taking a bath.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

But it isn't though, is it? That 1% makes a huge difference. Now the main reason is that you put sugar in Coca Cola. There's a lot of sugar, grams and grams of it. But aspartame, it's so sweet. You just need this little sprinkling of it.

[A]

By volume, it's almost nothing.

[B]

By volume, it's almost nothing.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

So fruit juices, coffee and tea, alcoholic drinks like beer, that's also. It's like Coca Cola, it's 90% water. But whiskeys, alcohol, spirits, they are, they can, they can be majority, not water. So that's the thing I want to discuss today is like, what do we do with these edge cases? Because you can get 192 proof alcohol, that's 96% alcohol, which is a liquid at room temperature. That's not water.

[A]

Yes, you're right. I think also there, the other edge cases right at the other end. I think it's probably important for us to say that tap water is just. It's basically like a rock smoothie. You know, I don't think of water as though it's just water. This has got all kinds of stuff in there.

[B]

It's. Yeah.

[A]

I mean, there's calcium, there's magnesium, there's sodium, there's potassium, there's alliums.

[B]

LA's water is very hard.

[A]

Is it?

[B]

It's got a lot of minerals in it compared to, say, the water in the Catskills which provides water to New York City. In fact, there's a theory that it's that water that New York City gets from the Catskills that creates for them their unique, special, one of a kind pizza doughs and bagels.

[A]

Makes it taste different.

[B]

It makes it taste different. And this isn't just some kind of guess. It's. It really is true that those minerals affect how the gluten forms. It affects how the flour sticks together. And so there are companies that will either truck New York City tap water to your business, whether it be in Florida or Philadelphia. There are also companies that replicate New York City's tap water off site by adding in minerals, having some kind of ionizing plant to make water that's like New York's so that you can recreate what they get for free.

[A]

Because this is the thing, right, is that, you know, if, if, if water is just absorbing all of the minerals from, from the rock that it passes through, then actually you end up with different water being effectively like a really nice geological postcode of, of where it comes From.

[B]

Oh, sure, of course.

[A]

Right. Different pieces of water from around the world end up having these different compositions of the minerals. But what that means is that you can then reverse engineer it. So let's say that you're kind of drinking water your whole life. Those minerals, those isotopes as well, will end up embedding themselves within your body. So you can, if you find a body, for instance. Right. Somebody who's died, you can take a hair sample from them, go through and work out what water they were drinking when they were alive in order to backtrace where they spent the majority of that time from. There's also. You can do this with whales as well. So whales, they have. The ear bones of whales also will absorb the isotopes in the water as they're swimming. And different parts of the world. Right. It's not just kind of fresh drinking water that has this, this, this postcode element. Also, the oceans have different concentrations of minerals, different isotopes. So you can basically reverse engineer the migration patterns of a whale, work out where in the world it's been, based on an analysis of the water that it was, that it was drinking and consuming and surrounded by actually. Do whales drink water?

[B]

Well, they definitely take it in.

[A]

They take it in.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Drinking's probably a bit strong.

[B]

Oh, hey, guys. I haven't had a drink in a while. All right, I'm good. But yeah, yeah. So they've got traces of the, the postcode of the water.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Characteristics of the water around them.

[A]

Exactly. You can do this with fossils as well. Right. So whale fossils, you know, you can go through and work the point in history at which whales started their migration patterns.

[B]

How interesting.

[A]

That. Cool. Yeah.

[B]

So I could find a dead body and figure out if they were a tap water drinker or some kind of little Dasani sipper.

[A]

Well, I think if they are, if they're drinking Coca Cola exclusively, it does make it slightly harder.

[B]

Tap water is a kind of mineral water. It's got minerals in it. That's the stuff that forms on your faucet, you know, over time you get this scale that builds up and that's just minerals that had been in the water. Hot water can dissolve a lot more minerals. So hot water will tend to form much more of a scale. And it also tastes a lot different. That's why when you make tea, you warm up cold water, you don't start with the hot water because it has a very different taste.

[A]

Well, okay, now you're talking with tea, because this isn't just making flour and dough. Right. This is like you are directly tasting the minerals in the water. And if you speak to British people, they will tell you that if you're in Yorkshire, a cup of tea, so much more delicious than if you're in London. So you completely taste the difference in the water. But you get this in beer as well. Right. Like the flavour in the water changes the taste of the beer. In fact, there's this British company, they're a beer subscription service. They're great guys, I like them a lot. The sponsorship team may or may not have been talking to them. Anyway, what they've done is they've gone to these really small breweries around the country and been like, hey, we want hundreds of thousands of cans of beer for our customers. And these small breweries have been like, like, well, I don't know, we're just not really able to, to fulfill that. So they've kind of stepped in to help them manufacture these numbers. But knowing that it's going to be really difficult to turn these small breweries to like, up their, their manufacturing. What they've done is they're using this reionization plant in Buxton where they, they go in to a small brewery, they work out the chemical composition of the water, the local water that they've been using to make their beer. They go to this re ionization plant in Buxton and then tweak the water.

[B]

Ever so to replicate the local water.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Right.

[A]

At which point they can then make these huge runs of beer.

[B]

And it makes a difference.

[A]

It makes a difference. I mean, look, you find, you find a Yorkshire tea drinker and they'll tell you it'll definitely make a difference.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, what's dissolved in your water makes a big difference. You mentioned earlier that a cup of water is like a rock smoothie. Right. Because you've got rocks dissolved in it. Magnesium and calcium. I would go a step further though and say that a glass of water is actually just a glass of lava.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Because I've talked about this before and I bring it up whenever I can. Ice is a rock.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Because. Well, hold on, ice is a mineral because a mineral is just a inorganic material that is solid and has a definite crystal structure, which ice does. Water is important for life, but it's inorganic, actually. It would exist here whether there was life or not. And what that then means is that a cube of ice is made of a mineral. So it's a mono mineralic rock. So melted ice is molten rock, lava. So water is lava.

[A]

I'm here for this.

[B]

And this is Not a joke. Ice won the mineral cup back in 2015, I believe. Like, some geologists all voted on their favorite mineral and ice finally got the record it deserves.

[A]

Yeah, got the prize.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, sure, I'm happy with that classification. If the rock people say it's so, then I'm happy with it. They also move the same way. I mean, when lava gets spurted out of volcano, it uses. The way that it moves and behaves.

[B]

Is exactly what, like the fluid dynamics of lava?

[A]

Fluid dynamics of lava is the same as water at that stage. Yeah. Bit later on when it cools down, then it's. Then it changes.

[B]

Is it more like ice?

[A]

More like ice. There's a transition phase where it's more like toothpaste, where it needs a certain amount of sheer forces in order for it to flow.

[B]

But that would be analogous to, like slush, maybe, or maybe.

[A]

Yeah. So now that we've established that ice is a mineral and that water is lava, I think we'll take a little break. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research uk. In the uk, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Tell you what, though, I've already had it. So between us, we're fine now.

[B]

I'm safe.

[A]

That's not how statistics works.

[B]

Shoot.

[A]

The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins?

[B]

And over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve. Like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by hpv, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible.

[A]

Indeed it did, by vaccine and it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in women in their 20s.

[B]

And knowing about HPV improves screening, and that's vital for diagnosing cervical cancer early.

[A]

I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the uk. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never, never have to deal with.

[B]

For more information about Cancer Research uk, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org restiscience.

[A]

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[B]

Pretty much. Pretty much. But let's talk more about the water on Earth and like how much there is and what form it's in, because I think we in our day to day lives are very biased to think of water as this splashy puddle stuff. It's in lakes and rivers, but that is basically not what water is on Earth at all.

[A]

Go on.

[B]

Well, Earth has a lot of water and it's famous for having a lot of water on the surface. But it's not water that we can just come up and drink because it's too salty. Most of Earth's water is way too salty. It would kill you to drink it.

[A]

Wait, when you say most, what are we talking here? What percentage of the water is?

[B]

I'll tell you. I'm gonna have to pull up a chart because I want to get these numbers just right. So here's the deal. Earth has a lot of water. But of all that water on the entire planet, both on it and in it, only 2 1/2% is fresh. The rest is not salty and the rest is salty. But that 2.5% sounds small. But what we're looking for is even smaller because out of that 2.5%, almost 70% is frozen in glaciers and ice caps, so not accessible to just come up and sip. And then another 30% of that is groundwater, not up on the surface. So only 1.2% of the two and a half percent that's fresh is on the surface, basically.

[A]

So wait, wait, it's 1% of the 2 1/2 percent.

[B]

1% of the 2 1/7% percent is surface fresh water. But we're still not done because surface is being used really broadly here. That includes 3% of that 1% of the 2% is water in the atmosphere.

[A]

Right?

[B]

This is very small, but it's worth mentioning. 0.26% of that little sliver is locked inside living organisms.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Almost 4% of that little sliver is dampness in the soil. So I can't just go up and like slurp it up. I could stick some mud in my mouth and like try and suck on it. We suck on it. But what we think of as fresh water. Water from. From creeks and springs and rivers and in lakes, that is. I did the math here. 0.0072% of all the water on earth.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

It is a tiny minuscule fraction of the 1% of the 2 1/2% that's not salt water.

[A]

And if you think about it, all of the water that we effectively come into contact with, all of the water we're drinking, all the water we're showering with, all the water you putting in swimming pools. All of that is contained within that number.

[B]

0072%. Yeah. But it's the water that is the star of the human show. It's what we swim in. It's what we get out of the tap and that we drink and that we have right here. There is no salt water around us right now.

[A]

No. I'm not interested in the salt water. Thank you very much.

[B]

We're interested in such a narrow kind of water.

[A]

Of that tiny, tiny sliver. How much of that is in Coca Cola? How much of that is tied up in.

[B]

Yeah. How much is tied up in warehouses, in cans of soda and beer and brewed tea? Yeah. I don't know. I do know. Here's a fun fact. The entire volume of refrigerated space and in the United States is equal to two thirds the volume of Mount Everest. Really? I can't tell if that sounds small or big.

[A]

I think that sounds big. And the reason why I think it sounds big. I'm slightly obsessed with fridges.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which I appreciate isn't a normal sentence. But they're wild. Like they are tricking the laws of thermodynamics.

[B]

I know.

[A]

It's like you have managed to create this sort of tiny bubble in the universe where you have like sucked energy away. That's not what energy likes to do. Like, it is miraculous that fridges have managed to work.

[B]

I know. And they do it so simply.

[A]

So simply.

[B]

They're just squirting around a fluid and the fluids properties are like, let's do it. Let's dump this heat out. Keep your yogurt nice.

[A]

And I mean, also, just think about before fridges existed. Right. You could have lived I don't know. For, like, most of the planet would never have experienced a cold drink. Right.

[B]

I know.

[A]

Like, it's just. It's wild to me that we've had this thing for like, a hundred years or so. Maybe a little bit more. 150 or so. I find bridges, really. Can we do a whole episode on fridges, please?

[B]

Yeah, we should. But where did all this water come from on Earth? How old is it? How long has it been around?

[A]

Well, it didn't get made on Earth, Right. That's one thing that we know.

[B]

Water isn't produced naturally on Earth, right?

[A]

Correct. Which means it came here from space.

[B]

Alien water.

[A]

Alien water, yeah.

[B]

I've heard that it probably came from, like, comets that crashed into a dry Earth and they left all this ice. It's hard to imagine, though, how many comets that would be. I guess that's why they call that the heavy bombardment period, when Earth was just getting smacked by these comets from way out beyond the solar system, made of ice, covered in ice, and they just delivered the oceans to us over time.

[A]

Do we know how old the water is then?

[B]

More than half of the water on Earth is older than the sun.

[A]

How do they know that?

[B]

Water can form naturally. It's an inorganic material. It's a molecule that can form all throughout the universe. And we know this because of a couple of things. One, when the sun formed, any water near the sun would have been obliterated into oxygen and hydrogen. Just elemental or molecular forms, wouldn't be water anymore. And so any of the water that remained would have had to have been further out where it couldn't get destroyed by the sun forming. And then later, as the formation was complete, that water could fall down to Earth. And I think they've been able to test this by looking at the amount of heavy water in water on Earth and compare it to how water could have been formed more recently in the solar system.

[A]

And by heavy water, right?

[B]

I mean water, where the hydrogen atoms in it are deuterium, which is what, hydrogen with one neutron? Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Chubby hydrogen.

[B]

Chubby hydrogen. So it's still hydrogen, because all you need to be a hydrogen atom is one proton with a little electron around. You get a little neutron in there, you're heavier, but you don't have any more protons. So your chemical properties are pretty similar. So it's still hydrogen, but it's called heavy. Now, I do want to give a shout out to tritium if, if. If a second neutron comes along and joins that hydrogen nucleus. Now it's Got one proton and two neutrons and it's, it's super heavy. We call it tritium. And it's, it's unstable. It's so chubby, it's about to, like, just barf stuff out. So it's radioactive. So tritium is extremely light radioactive gas and it can be used. You might find it on watches. They fill. They fill parts of the dial with tritium gas inside, little ampoules covered in like, some kind of phosphorus material. So when the radioactivity of the tritium hits the phosphorus, it glows. And they can make it glow for.

[A]

Decades because it's decaying, because it's radioactive. Consistent way.

[B]

And I think the particles that it decays out are mainly alpha particles, which.

[A]

Means they can't penetrate your skin.

[B]

They don't penetrate. They don't even penetrate the glass ampule. Yeah, that. They only hit the phosphorus on the inside, but, yeah, they won't go through even a sheet of paper. They won't go through your skin. It's much better than like, what uranium does.

[A]

Shout out to tritium.

[B]

Shout out to tritium. Yeah. But heavy water is water formed from deuterium and oxygen.

[A]

I should say, though, actually, if you were drinking heavy water, different story.

[B]

Yeah. What happens?

[A]

Well, because then you've got this radioactivity going on inside you and the particles cannot escape your body.

[B]

But deuterium isn't radioactive.

[A]

No, but you don't want to be drinking tritium.

[B]

What do they call water made with tritium? Super heavy water. I don't think there's much. No, I think deuterium happens much more frequently in a context where water can be made. But I don't know. I know that if you drink a lot of heavy water, deuterium, oxygen, water, it can be bad over time. We're always drinking a little bit. Yeah, there's some deuterium, there's some heavy water in there.

[A]

You know what you also shouldn't be drinking is pure water.

[B]

Why not?

[A]

I mean that it is not good. Not good. Because if you think about tap water as how it's got all of this, these minerals, these rock basically dissolved inside of it. If you took away all of that.

[B]

So you only had water molecules, H2O. H2O.

[A]

Right. Now you have to remember that water is extremely good at dissolving things within it. So if that goes through your body, what that will do effectively is strip your body of all of the minerals that it naturally uses and it can just be a very bad thing. You can give yourself water poisoning. Not by drinking pure water. I mean. Although. That too. But by drinking huge amounts of just tap water.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, man. I know about water poisoning. One of our producers was saying that in college they would even try to get drunk on water. Which is, by the way, a terrible idea. If you drink too much water, even water that does have minerals in it, you get confused.

[A]

Hallucinate.

[B]

You hallucinate. I looked up the LD50 of water. The LD50 is the dosage of anything all at once that causes 50% of a test population to die. And in rats, poor waterlogged rats, it's 90,000 milligrams per kilogram of body mass.

[A]

Sorry, 90,000 milligrams of water per kilogram per kilogram of mass.

[B]

Body mass.

[A]

Wait, 90,000 milligrams. Oh, God. Can you not just give me. In kilos.

[B]

Okay, look. Okay, 90 grams of water per kilogram of body mass in rats, which, like a lab rat doesn't even weigh a.

[A]

Kilo, so half a kilo, maybe.

[B]

Like What? Yeah.

[A]

So 40 grams of water could kill a rat. Would give a 50% chance of killing a rat.

[B]

A 50% chance of killing a Rat. If you gave them 40 grams of water right away, nothing. Isn't that incredible?

[A]

That's like a double shot.

[B]

Sorry, Rats.

[A]

I mean, I guess when you think about it, if you have a rat, like a pet rat, and when they drink water, they drink like, literally a drop at a time.

[B]

That's right. Yeah. They're drinking like a gram at a time, and then they're done for a while.

[A]

That's not very much, though, still.

[B]

It's not very much. No. I mean, our bodies have this very fragile balance of homeostasis where we're healthy.

[A]

Hold on.

[B]

Just like a rat does.

[A]

Let me work it out for a human. So what was that, 90 grams per kilogram?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Seven kilos of water, basically.

[B]

Seven kilos of water. That's because. What. How much water weighs a kilo?

[A]

A thousand? It's the same.

[B]

It's a kilogram.

[A]

So seven liters of. Seven liters of water is a lot.

[B]

Though, actually, because as I was looking into actual cases of water poisoning, there was someone who drank six liters of water in three hours and died.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So that kind of makes sense. Three hours is. Is a long period of time, though, compared to LD50 usually means immediately, like, you give it all at once. You couldn't probably put six or seven liters of water into someone right away.

[A]

And the way that this kills you is that. I mean, it's the same as if you drink pure water, right, it's that you have these minerals in your body that are actually extremely important to the function of your cells. And because you are putting through, effectively, a solvent through, your system is stripping away those minerals and ejecting them from your body and robbing your body of the things that it needs to function.

[B]

That's right, yeah. Your blood and your tissues, they've all got a much higher concentration of dissolved solids than water does. So you water your body down, you lose those electrolytes and you can die. Six or seven liters in three hours will do it.

[A]

My mum once gave herself water poisoning. She was in hospital and she had a kidney infection. She'd been in for pneumonia and the doctor said to her, just make sure you drink lots of water. And she's Irish and really has an unhealthy respect for authority. So she took. She took it very, very, very literally. And I don't know how much she drank, but my goodness me, it was awful.

[B]

What happened?

[A]

She just. She just. For a few days, she just. Well, I think she basically induced the same effect that. That our producer intended as a student. Don't do it to yourselves, though, because you also, I mean, people, as you say, right, you genuinely can die from this.

[B]

You genuinely can. And it's, I think, underappreciated how dangerous it is. There are a lot of, like, hazing rituals that involve making people chug a bunch of water and then they'll wind up having to go to the hospital because they're intoxicated with water. Their bodies, their brains, their cognition, it's all hampered by this electrolyte imbalance induced by drinking too much water.

[A]

You know, I. I went to Singapore to go and talk to them about their water system and in Singapore they have, like, you wouldn't think it because it's, you know, where it is in the world. It rains all the time, but it's extremely water scarce. Right. They have real critical issues about the amount of water they have because they've got very small land area and a really high population of people. So what they do in Singapore is they take raw sewage and they process it through a plant and then immediately, with the output of that, that system, put that purified distilled water back into the taps, right? Oh, yeah.

[B]

Just like the International Space Station.

[A]

Just like the International Space Station, exactly.

[B]

Yesterday's coffee is today's coff coffee.

[A]

I, you know, luckily didn't have to be there for the sewage part, but it was effectively drinking water that, that morning had Been sewage.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Just tasted like water, to be honest with you.

[B]

Of course.

[A]

But the thing is, the water they create ends up being so pure. Right? So, like, stripped of minerals, they don't actually even use it for drinking water. Instead, they use it, they sell it to. To places that are making semiconductors and electrical equipment who need that purer water.

[B]

So every time you've blushed, you're helping technology. Helping technology.

[A]

That's what they say in the iss.

[B]

That's really good to know. When you look at Earth from the outside, it is covered in water.

[A]

70% or so.

[B]

70% of its surface is just covered in water. But Earth's surface is nothing compared to its inside, especially because it's a sphere. Smallest surface area to volume ratio. And I once did this calculation that if you scaled the Earth down to be just 30 centimeters across, like a foot across, like a typical classroom globe, the total amount of water on there would be just. Just under a tablespoon, 14 milliliters. So imagine like a little less than a tablespoon of water. Throw that on a globe in a classroom. That's all the water that fills all the oceans, because they're just not that deep compared to Earth's radius.

[A]

Well, I guess if you think about it, it's like the distance between the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench is like, what, 13 kilometers? Something like that. Yeah, roughly. And yet the earth is 40,000 km in circumference. So we're talking about. I mean, it's unimaginably smooth, and it's just, I guess with surface tension on the globe in the classroom.

[B]

Yeah. How would you do this at that scale? You'd somehow need to get, like, about a tablespoon of water on the globe. So it would just kind of be like a damp globe. A giant that could hold our Earth wouldn't be like, oh, it's soaking wet. It'd be like a tiny bit sleepy. Brush it off. Yeah. Oh, it's got a little dew on it.

[A]

You could imagine doing it with something that had a different viscosity. Right. Like some different fluid properties. You could like. It's almost like you put a polish.

[B]

That's right. You could take like 14 milliliters, a little less than a tablespoon of honey, and smear that onto a globe and say, that's it. That's all the water, period. Am I including, like, groundwater and stuff here? I think in those figures, I was including all types, even the water in the atmosphere.

[A]

But then of that, the 14 milliliters it's. What was it? 0.0.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. As an American would say, 0.0076% of all of Earth's water is surface liquid, drinkable, fresh water.

[A]

Which means the water we're drinking, slash coffee, I mean, has been through many, many animals, creatures in the past. Almost certainly we're drinking dinosaur pee.

[B]

Oh, almost certainly. Yeah, yeah. That whole thing about, like, oh, yeah, you know, every breath you take contains some atoms that Julius Caesar breathed in.

[A]

Here's the thing I like to think right in our evolutionary past, I mean, we started off in the water, and then it was one point where, you know, started laying eggs on land and kind of eventually evolved into creatures that could live predominantly on land. You know, we didn't leave the water behind us. All we did was we just turned ourselves into water balloons and carried it with us as we go.

[B]

That's right, isn't it?

[A]

And like, as you're, you know, drinking your drink during the day, what you're doing is you're just. You're just topping up the evaporation that you're. That you're experiencing.

[B]

We like to call ourselves land animals, but really we're water balloons. In fact, the first. The first living things to move onto land would do it, but then they'd go back into the water to lay their eggs. But there was a major evolutionary step where animals evolved that laid their eggs on land, and they needed to have a hard shell for that so that the water wouldn't all evaporate away.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

They needed to evolve water balloon production, reproduction organs. And they did. And that's still what we do today. We're moisturizing, we are drinking water, we're eating water in our foods, and we just don't really belong up here still.

[A]

This is the reason why you weigh less in the morning. Do you know this?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

You are. You are literally evaporating overnight.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. You weigh less in the morning because you're losing water. And you know how you're losing it.

[A]

Right as you're breathing, as you're coming.

[B]

Out, your hot, moist breath is just like a weight loss secret.

[A]

If you just carried on like that, you would eventually end up as a raisin.

[B]

Yeah, you would. The land is just a raisin factory, and we are temporary tourists up here.

[A]

Are there any liquids that aren't predominantly water, though?

[B]

Yeah, that's what I was just thinking about.

[A]

Well, honey. Okay, sure.

[B]

Honey is liquid, like. Yeah.

[A]

I want more, though. I want more than 18. I want something that is not water at all.

[B]

Yeah. So let's look at things that are liquid at room temperature and pressure on earth. So, okay, mercury, can't drink it. Can't drink it. Bromine, can't drink it. Alcohols and oils.

[A]

But alcohols, if you're talking 100% pure alcohols, ethanol, methanol, whatever you might make.

[B]

It'S pretty hard to make.

[A]

Pretty hard to make. But also, don't drink it.

[B]

Don't drink it. And you. Okay, you could drink, like, olive oil.

[A]

Surely there's still some water in olive oil.

[B]

Olive oil contains about 0.03% water.

[A]

Wow. Which is very small.

[B]

It's very small. It almost seems like you could find that much water in anything. Even, like, in, you know, pure gasoline. There's gonna be a little bit of, like, moisture just from the humidity of the environment.

[A]

What about glycerin? Actually?

[B]

Glycerin, you could drink that, right?

[A]

I reckon you did. It's probably past three. I mean, once you start categorizing things, then we're basically down to everything is either olive oil or dinosaur pee.

[B]

Yeah, as it should be.

[A]

As it should be.

[B]

And I'm glad for it. You know, I was once looking up the etymology of the word loser.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Don't ask me why, but as it turns out, to be a loser is the same as to be dissolved. Is it dissolving, solution? Loser. These words all come from the same observed phenomenon, which is dissolving to be lost in water.

[A]

And so lose is the same. Lose from the same.

[B]

When you put water or minerals into water, they get lost. They dissolve because you can't see them anymore. You can't see them anymore. And when you work on a math problem, or just a problem in your own life, what you're looking for is a solution, a circumstance in which the problem just like. Like minerals and water dissolves, and it goes away and it's no longer visible.

[A]

I love that.

[B]

Isn't that beautiful?

[A]

So, but then. Wait, what are you losing? What's the.

[B]

Like, what is dissolving away and disappearing? I guess you're like, opportunity to be a winner is now gone.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Maybe you've lost the respect of the spectators or something. But yourself. Yourself, yeah, family. But if it wasn't for losers, we wouldn't be here. We need dissolved solids in water.

[A]

I mean, there is, as I have very much come to the conclusion over the last half an hour, nothing more important than this particular loser here. This jug of largely H2O and a lot of other stuff.

[B]

Exactly, yeah. Life depends on that loser. We're all losers. In a way, you and I are losers and you are a loser that we love very much. If you've had fun, follow us on wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment subscribe Give us a favorite what else does YouTube offer? Can you do favorites anymore? Oh, I'm really dating myself here as always. You can email [e-mail] thank you.

[A]

Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.

[B]

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