What If You Drank and Couldn't Stop?

At 6:12 on a hot evening in Chicago you pour a glass of water, and you keep drinking. The glass fills before you turn the tap. The juice, the milk, the dog's bowl, the fish tank. Then the building's water, the street's, Lake Michigan through your window, every lake and river on Earth, the water in the ground, the ice, and at 6:20 the last of the sea, from eleven kilometres down in the Mariana Trench. Earth is dry, and you're still thirsty. So the water starts coming from further away: out of the rock, off the Moon and Mars, from Ceres, Europa, the rings of Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, the comets of the Oort cloud, a nebula 1,344 light-years away, and a quasar so far out that its water won't get here for twelve billion years. The readout in the corner is everything you've drunk, the whole way. The numbers are real. A stomach holds about a litre and your kidneys can clear about a litre an hour; six litres in an afternoon has killed people, because water dilutes the salt in your blood. A kitchen tap gives about 8 litres a minute, a fire hydrant about 95 a second. The Thames through London is 65 cubic metres a second, Niagara 2,400, the Mississippi 16,800, the Amazon 209,000, every river on Earth together about 1.2 million, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current about 130 million. Lake Michigan is 4,920 cubic kilometres, the Great Lakes 22,700, every lake and river on Earth about 191,000, everything in the sky at once 12,900. The ground holds about 23 million, the ice about 25 million, the sea 1.34 billion: all of it together would make a ball 1,385 km across. Four hundred kilometres down, the rock holds between one and three more oceans. The Moon's poles hold about 600 million tonnes of ice, Mars about 5 million cubic kilometres, Ceres more fresh water than Earth ever had, Europa about twice our oceans. Saturn's rings are about one percent of a sea. Neptune and Uranus are mostly hot, crushed water and other ices. The Oort cloud is a trillion comets, about five Earths of mostly ice. The Orion nebula makes enough water to fill our oceans sixty times a day, and the most water anyone has found is around the quasar APM 08279+5255: 140 trillion oceans, twelve billion light-years away. Some of it is not real. Nothing could drink like this and live, and water doesn't come to anyone on its own: the pull is drawn so you can see where everything is going. Where it all goes once it's in you is left out. The shots from outside your eyes slow the story down, and a few long stretches where only the water keeps coming are sped up. The balls of water over the city are drawn at the sizes the numbers give, at made-up distances, and the timing of everything after the sea is made up. Earth was dry in eight minutes. The rest is still on its way. 0:00 Still thirsty 0:28 Your blood 1:01 Anything you could drink 1:16 The building 1:31 The street 1:49 The beach 2:09 The harbour 2:28 The river 2:46 The lake turns 3:11 Lake Michigan 3:45 The rain 4:07 The Great Lakes 4:55 Every lake and river 5:39 The ground 6:09 The ice 7:04 The sea pulls back 7:40 The sea 8:45 Dry 9:23 The rock 9:43 The Moon and Mars 10:37 Ceres and the comets 11:03 Europa 11:50 The big moons, the rings 12:42 Neptune and Uranus 13:34 The Oort cloud 14:14 The Sun and Orion 14:49 Twelve billion years 15:21 The last drop Piano: Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0) Earth: NASA Earth Observatory, Blue Marble with topography and bathymetry (public domain) Type: Newsreader and Inter (SIL Open Font License) #whatif #science #water #ocean #space