I was watching Hank Green’s youtube channel the other day and came across an interesting fact. Okay, so, you know how camels are known for their humps, and how they supposedly(!) store water in their humps?
No. Turns out no. They don’t. I know. I’m just as surprised as you are. It’s like all the fun little things we learned in school are just… I dunno, lies? Like apparently 2 is a prime number?! And Napoleon was just some average-heighted dude and not some cartoonishly short guy like the British said?
Anyway, camels.
No, they don’t store water in their humps, at least not exactly. They store fat in their humps and burn the fat for energy. But here’s the kicker: For every 1 gram of fat they burn, they produce 1.1 grams of water… which means, if the camel’s hump DID store water, it would be less water than the water they produce by storing fat in their humps! The camel expels CO2 as it goes about its day, burning carbon from the fat deposit, and leaving hydrogen in the fat behind, and that hydrogen combines with the oxygen the camel is breathing and BOOM: Water.
It’s about now you’re thinking: “Is this the church page? Did I click on the wrong link?”
The point is: Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. That’s the “law of conservation of mass,” and it’s the reason why a camel’s hump can, in a way, provide more water for the camel than if the hump just contained water. It produces more water because it burns matter (carbon) and draws in other matter (oxygen), to create matter (water).
But in the beginning, God made water, oxygen, hydrogen… all of it. The idea of the conservation of mass is that everything basically is here, and comes and goes, changes and merges with other things to create new things, etc, but it’s like the universe is just this big bowl of stuff and there’s not any more new stuff being added to the bowl, just a bunch of new things coming from the same old building blocks.
Except, where did the building blocks come from? Who put the stuff in the bowl in the first place? Where’d the bowl come from?!
God.
It’s His universe. We’re just living in it, and some of us are using our humps to make water and stuff… and I just think that’s neat.
~Matthew