Water Purification Curiosity

No.

You drink the water and keep moving towards an exit.

Oddly I was wondering this exact same thing (Vodka, not Jäger…) the other day. I'm curious what responses this receives.

No, and there's the risk that the water contains toxins from blue green algae which cannot be removed by any backpacking filter or water treatment methods.

I'd move on and look for another source.

after you add some alcohol can the sunlight help improve the water somehow, doesnt it kill some stuff or something.

Leave in the sun and wait 6 hours on a sunny day http://modernsurvivalblog.com/health/how-to-purify-water-with-sunlight/ or Drink it and start heading out like cameron said.

Fun question. I'm guessing most microbiologists would know the answer more definitively, but a few calculations and comparisons make it pretty clear.

Vodka's around 40% ethanol and you're diluting it thirty-something fold for a final concentration of not much more than 1%. As long as you're willing to give it a bit of time, you don't need hand sanitizer gel concentrations (60-70% ethanol) for most nasties, but you're still at least an order of magnitude away from concentrations that are generally recognized as microbicidal.

Cheers,

Bill S.

Beer in Medieval Europe was around 1-5% alcohol. It was safer to drink than water, but mostly because boiling during the brewing process warded most of the evil spirits.

You would want to boil the water, with a wood fire, in the gatorade bottle. It sounds crazy, but you can boil water in a plastic bottle. The plastic will twist and warp but long as there is water in the bottle, it won't melt or break. Sure, you will be releasing all kinds of nasty chemicals into the water, but it's better than getting horribly sick. Only use this method if you are in a desperate situation.

There are also other ways to boil water involving heating up rocks in a fire and then placing them into the water. The ways to contain that water are up to you. You could dig a trench and line it with a garbage bag as a sort of basin for your drinking water. You could even burn out a bowl into a log and use that. Or use a turtle shell. Your mind is your best survival tool.

I remember hearing about a study many years ago when I lived in south Louisiana, which found that the alcohol in wine would help protect against bacteria in raw shellfish if consumed at the same meal, but beer wasn't strong enough. Taking that as a guideline, if a liter doesn't get you hammered it won't hammer the bugs either.