Question: One possible difficulty with this circulation may still remain. Each year, some nitrogen is removed from the atmosphere by a process called nitrogen fixation. Nitrogen fixation converts nitrogen in the atmosphere to a form used by plants as fertilizer ammonium or nitrate. After nitrogen enters the plant and the plant dies, the nitrogen will then reside in the soil or in water, be taken up by another plant, or be returned to the atmosphere. The passage of nitrogen among these locations is called the nitrogen cycle. If a sizable portion of the nitrogen in Caesar's last breath now resides in soil, water, or plants in the form of fixed nitrogen, then we may have overestimated the chances of breathing some of it in. Given that there are \(\sim 4 \times 10^{18} \mathrm{~kg}\) (nitrogen) in the atmosphere and the global rate of nitrogen fixation has averaged about \(2 \times 10^{11} \mathrm{~kg}\) (nitrogen)/year over the past several millennia (Appendix XIII in COW-1), explain why the correction made for fixed nitrogen is not going to affect our answer very much. Can you think of any other possible corrections to our calculation?

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