Resistance is futile

Today I intended to verify a citation from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. V'ger (SPOILER : If you have been living in a cavern for the last 28 years, don’t read this post) which is revealed to be the unmanned scientific probe Voyager 6, wanted to destroy the human race, which he refer as the carbon life-based.

I wanted to see how much this is true, since the most common citation are about that our body is constituted of about 70% of water. Obviously there’s no carbon in water so I was really wandering about this carbon thing.

It appears that carbon is a base element of our DNA and RNA. It’s also part of sugars, celluloses, chitins, alcohols, fats, aromatic esters, alkaloids, antibiotics, amino acids and proteins.

Another interesting fact is that the fat free mass of a human body is made of 70% of water. Note that the fat free mass is the total mass minus the total fat weigh. Since a normal man should have between 13 and 17 percent fat and a female should be composed of between 20 and 25 percent fat the real percentage of water in the human body should be closer to 58%.