What's the shelf life on a captured fart?

Factual Questions
1

I hope this isn’t too technical…

If you fart in a jar, does ripen or dissipate over time? If you open it a month later, does it smell like fart, moldy fart or just air?

This thread has many inspirations.

  1. this thread
  2. the way I borrow a friends car and always tell them I farted in it right before I got out as I hand the keys back. It’s never true, but I wonder if it would stink hours later if it were. (yes ladies I’m single. Can I borrow your car?)
  3. a story I heard when I was around 10. Supposedly a high school girl farted in a jar and closed it, then waited a week or two before taking it to school and releasing it into the wild. It was quite pungent, according to the story, and I always wondered if the story were true/possible.
  4. the Sarah Silverman program where her two neighbors find a jar which one of them had farted in years earlier when they first moved there. This led to them trying to get each other to inadvertantly smell contained farts and culminated in one of them duct-taping the bathroom door and filling it with farts through a hose.
2

Jamie and Adam from “Mythbusters” gave Craig Ferguson a captured, stored fart when they were on the show recently. Just FYI. :slight_smile:

3

This is just a WAG, but since you’ve only had one other answer so far…

The distinctive aroma of a fart doesn’t come from any magical quality. To quote Cecil, "The noxious fragrance of which you complain is produced by minute amounts of other digestive by-products, typically containing sulfur, such as hydrogen sulfide, methanethiol, and dimethyl sulfide." If you had an entirely airtight jar, you’d still have the same sulfur molecules that you started with. Maybe they’d degrade over time, maybe they wouldn’t- IANAChemist. If your jar is not completely 100% sealed, presumably the sulfur compounds would leak away over time, until your canned fart was indistinguishable from the surrounding air.

4

Of course, even if the sulfur compounds decayed into something else, most sulfur compounds are pretty aromatic (or rather, ugly aromatic). So it might not still smell like a fart, but it’d probably still stink.