this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 96 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

This seems like a XKCD / Randall Munroe "What if" kind of question. I.e., how long would a person survive if all of the water inside them was turned into wine?

[–] [email protected] 96 points 2 months ago (3 children)

A quick search suggests that blood is 80% water. Turning that into wine at a weak concentration of 5.5% results in around at 14.5% BAC which is over 10 times greater than the highest ever recorded, so it would be certainly lethal.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago

Wine is 80-90% water, but all that alcohol and other flavor compounds directly in your bloodstream would not be good.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, but how long before I croak?!?!? I need to know now!

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Pretty much immediately. You wouldn't even know it.

Acidic pH like wine denatures proteins. It would destroy you on the cellular level, basic cell functions would cease to work. You could say it would stop your breathing or cause an instant heart attack, but it would be more like as if it fried your brain and heart like an egg in an instant.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The brain isn’t bathed in blood though, because of the blood-brain barrier. So if we’re limiting to only the blood turning to wine, it’ll take a couple seconds of excruciating pain before the brain goes night-night from lack of oxygen.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have a different question. How much wine extract can i add to the water in my body to be able to correctly state i exist out of 80% wine and still live.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's much easier. If you weigh 100kg (220lb) it's W/(100 + W) = 0.8, and solving for W gives 400.

If you eat 400 kg of wine powder then 80% of your mass will be wine.

This will kill you, and it doesn't actually matter what powder you choose to eat.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You are saying that you would have to eat four times your body weight of wine powder to turn your blood into wine. That doesn’t make sense.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

It kinda does its just not what you expected (and not what the question meant). In a 500kg mixture of you (100kg) and wine (400kg), exactly 80% of that mixture is wine and 20% is you.

To answer the actually question you'd need to know how much extract you need to turn 1L of blood into 1L of wine and I'm to lazy for that math.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Wine is 15% alcohol.

Human are 60% water.

Human weight around 70kg

70 x 0.6 = 42 L

42 x 0.15 = 6.3 L of pure alcohol.

You'd probably die before ingesting that amount tho

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

What if all the water turned to wine at 1 standard drink per hour

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Can Jesus turn the water in wine into wine?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wait, is that what brandy is?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sort of. You distil the wine, ethanol comes out first in a higher concentration than water, you also get some bits of the wine flavour, but some is left behind as well. Over time the ABV of the liquid coming out of the still drops as the ethanol is mostly boiled off. Mostly. There would probably still be traces of it left down to the last few drops if you were to evaporate all of it.

Fun fact though when chefs add wine and say "it just boils off", this is mostly a lie. Depending on how you are cooking it some amount will remain. A long stew probably removes most but something quick would still contain a lot of the alcohol. But it's a very small amount in total.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It's not untrue that it boils off, but dilution is the bigger factor by a wide margin. When I use wine to deglaze, it will be 100ml. That is then turned into 2 or 3 liters of sauce, so a dilution of 1:20, 1:30. Or, expressed in percentages, 3-5% of the sauce would be wine if none of it evaporated - 14% alcohol would be reduced to less than 0.5% just by dilution.

To get a similar reduction from evaporation, you'd need to boil off 95% of the alcohol, assuming none of the water is also evaporated, which it will at the temperature of deglazing. I don't know the exact ratios here, but even a 75% net alcohol evaporation (which I think is generous) would leave you with a 3.5% alcohol (light beer) before dilution.

Relevant Adam Ragusea video.

Edit: the table he shows has 95% actual alcohol loss for a 2.5 hours simmer, but every other method (where you'd "burn it off") is below 25%, so that's definitely a noticeble amount of alcohol left in, especially when you start with something like a brandy.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Better quality version:

Source: Instagram

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Wine is 80-90% water. So that can be turned into wine with a wine base. And so forth. What is the end result?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago

Ethanol poisoning apparently

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Ethanol with grape flavouring

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

kind of a dick move to leave your friend in a wheelchair when you're jesus

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Reminds me of when someone made the same observation in Avatar: the Last Airbender about waterbenders.

(Except in that one, the observation wasn’t from online comedians - it was a fridge horror episode in the show)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The show directly addressed this with blood bending, maybe not as viscerally as I've seen online but it definitely did. Like if water benders can build enormous ice walls they're definitely the most dangerous benders in Avatar. They could absolutely rip a person's soft tissues off their bones if they tried. It's just seen as so morally wrong that few benders even think about it. Like how we generally view mutilating a body in our societies or other strong taboos.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Earth benders can do the same with the iron in blood

Air benders can blow up your lungs

Firebenders can remove the heat from your body or boil your blood

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Which makes no sense considering there's a war going on. The fire nation goes around burning ppl alive. The last thing I would care about is the moral high road when my opponent genocided a bunch of monks.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Geneva suggestion

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Also reminds me of the lactokinetic in Misfits. He appeared harmless, but if you had consumed any dairy products that were still in your body, he could kill you instantly.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Never been impressed by the "water to wine" miracle.

My S/O can turn anything into whine.

[–] 21Cabbage 4 points 2 months ago

Did you have to help a chicken cross the road making that joke?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I bet it would take a long time for that body to rot.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

woah Jesus is a water bender??

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

This is actually (spoilers for terrible movie Scales: Mermaids Are Real) the climax of the movie Scales. Mermaids can control water and their blood heals people in that movie, so hunters are trying to get their blood and then one guy tries a last ditch bad guy move and the main character pulls all the water out of his body and he horrifically melts.

Kind of made me side with the hunters at that point it's a horrifying power.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Miss when superheroes had vague wording in their powers, leap great distances could scale up and down , mean anything

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So you're nostalgic for the Golden age? How old are you?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

I didn't see that coming. Nice surprise at the end.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Shame all his enemies are demon type who are immune to blood attacks, of course he can perform the cleansing ritual that has advantage against demon types casting possess so he isn't completely useless it's still a waste of a spell slot.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

To be fair, if he is good at his powers, he can probably turn just enough to have the person pass out without alcohol poisoning.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

So if wine is between 80-90% water anyway, doesn't seem that impressive.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

6% blood alcohol content is still pretty much lethal

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Turn the water in the wine into wine

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I thought we are 70% water

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Now we're at least 10% plastic, so that drove the other numbers down.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)
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