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Caesar's Last Breath
How many molecules from Caesar’s last breath do we inhale with each breath we take? Shockingly, the answer is about one molecule—we actually share breaths w...
It’s a beautiful introduction to the power of napkin math, showing how much you can figure out with just a few back-of-the-envelope numbers. If we assume that a breath diffuses evenly throughout the atmosphere and that these molecules are preserved over time (a reasonable assumption—nitrogen is relatively inert), then we can take Finding some of these values is itself a Fermi estimation—you might know that Mt Everest is about 10 km high or that planes cruise at that altitude and use it as an estimate for the atmosphere’s thickness.
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