Kittish
Enthusiastic Newbie
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2017
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My mind goes off in odd directions sometimes.
It's pretty much generally agreed that soap is something that only happens via human activity, that it doesn't occur spontaneously in nature.
Is that really true? Consider this scenario:
A forest fire, animals trapped and killed by the fire, corpses buried in ashes. And it rains. Is it not possible that you might, if you went and dug up the remains, find pockets and patches of saponification in the fat of the animal where rain had carried caustics leached from the ashes down?
Such a phenomenon would almost certainly be a short-lived one, as further rain dissolved and dispersed the saponified material, but could it happen? Has it happened and we've just never noticed?
It's pretty much generally agreed that soap is something that only happens via human activity, that it doesn't occur spontaneously in nature.
Is that really true? Consider this scenario:
A forest fire, animals trapped and killed by the fire, corpses buried in ashes. And it rains. Is it not possible that you might, if you went and dug up the remains, find pockets and patches of saponification in the fat of the animal where rain had carried caustics leached from the ashes down?
Such a phenomenon would almost certainly be a short-lived one, as further rain dissolved and dispersed the saponified material, but could it happen? Has it happened and we've just never noticed?