Sharing the air

My neighbor has proclaimed herself a citizen of the world. President Donald Trump decided that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accords. How do we find truth in all this disconnect?

To find out, I surfed the internet for answers. It is quite the rage on the internet to estimate how many molecules of oxygen you breathe today that were from Julius Caesar’s last breath in 44 AD. There is surprising agreement on this — one to two molecules of oxygen in each of our breaths were exhaled by Caesar when he breathed his last on the Ides of March.

That does not sound like much at all but it translates to about 23,000 molecules of oxygen each day that were also Caesar’s. Over an 80-year lifespan, you would have 673 million personal encounters by sharing oxygen with Alexander the Great and all the people he conquered, Jesus Christ, Ravi Shankar, Rosa Parks, Mohammad, an Inuit hunter in Alaska, Albert Einstein, an unnamed person near death from malnutrition in Somalia, any number of Manhattan billionaires, your long-dead great-grandmother, Kim Jong Un and everyone else on Earth.

These are direct and intimate connections we share across time and space. So as the political climate heats up in Washington, they all need to stop, take a breath, and think.

This story was originally published July 5, 2017 at 6:35 PM with the headline "Sharing the air."