I don't know why. . .

. . .I thought of this, but at some point Tuesday night this question crossed my mind:

"How long would it take all the water in the world to flow past a given point on a river?"

So in keeping with the mongoose motto, I ran and found out.

Googleing "how much water is there in the world," led me to a site that gave me the rough number of 42 million cubic miles.  Then Googleing "flow rate of the Mississippi" gave me a range from 200,000 to 700,000 cubic feet per second.  For ease of calculation I picked 500,000 as a representative number.

So you take 42 million cubic miles and multiply it by 5280 cubed to get the number of cubic feet.  Then you divide by 500,000 to get the number of seconds, then divide by 3600 to get the number of hours, then by 24 to get the number of days and finally by 365.25 to get years (the .25 accounts for leap years).

I ended up with about 392,000 years.

So now you know.

(wasn't that interesting?)