You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one
on Earth is any further removed than your fiftieth cousin. Murchie also
describes our kinship through an analysis of how deeply we share the air.
With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and –
owing to the wind’s ceaseless circulation – over a year’s time you have
intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every person alive, as
well as by everyone who ever lived.