(And: what a terrible article! On two occasions it simply says the exact same thing twice in succession in almost the same words. And it says this: "NASA’s water discovery should be a reminder that if we have the sophistication to discover galaxies full of water 12 billion light years away, we should be able to save people just an ocean away from drought-induced starvation." ... which makes as much sense as saying that if we have the sophistication to discover enormous black holes at the centres of galaxies, we ought to be able to make our own black holes in the laboratory, or that if we have the sophistication to accelerate protons to 0.999999991c in the LHC, we ought to be able to make cars go at at least 0.9c.)
I think that it would make for a truly epic space opera if written by the right author.
Or does the blackhole consume the entire cloud of water !
So many questions.
Imagine if life existed within it. They must be wondering if life outside a "cloud of water" is even possible ? A planet ?
It was made by the expanding shock wave from a supernova, through a gas cloud of mostly hydrogen. Lots got fused to oxygen, and then they combined. The tremendous amount of water is because its a vast expanding volume of space.
Then again, it's not that I could claim this is the most pretentious headline produced by an intelligent human either.
> The official NASA news release describes the amount of water as "140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans," which isn’t particularly helpful, except if you think about it like this.
> That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is.
Oh, so that's what that means! Gosh!
"The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water."
So let's see... 1.335e21 L per ocean, 1.4e14 oceans per space cloud, ~6 L per flush, 1051898.4 flushes per toilet per Gregorian year, ~1.4e9 toilets on Earth.
You could flush all the flush toilets currently installed on Earth, continuously, twice per minute, for 2.1e19 years.
Still too big. That's 1.5 billion times the age of the universe. No one can truly grasp that magnitude. Let's multiply the number of Earths and try to fix the time at the approximate age of the Earth. So, divide by 4.5e9 years... There we go.
You could continually flush all the currently installed flush toilets on Earth twice a minute over the entire history of the planet, on 4.7 billion identical Earths!
Finally! A completely meaningless number that everyone can understand! ~
