wouldn’t this evaporate extremely quick though?
Yeah, I’ll often spread spilled water across the table just so that it evaporates within a couple minutes.
Must be nice living somewhere dry. I’d just end up with a moldy table a day later.
It would instead instantly make it extremely obvious how uneven my floor is.
For a liquid to be a liquid, rather than a gas, it needs to be held together by intermolecular forces. Which means it will have some amount of surface tension. I therefore dismiss this hypothetical as physically unrealistic! :P
supercritical helium does some really weird shit, I’d call this one plausible.
Supecritical fluids are more like a gas than a liquid. Their lack of surface tension means they’ll diffuse throughout whatever container you put them in, so they can’t really be “poured” like a liquid can. They’re actually a pretty good example of why liquids need surface tension to be liquid.
that’s a pretty good point, it’s literally trapped between being a liquid and a gas. If this was BattleBots, they’d let it compete once and then ban it.
“Trapped between liquid and gas” is kind of the opposite of what a supercritical fluid is. It’s more that gas and liquid states are “trapped” in a region of phase space, while supercritical fluids exist in the place where the demarcation between the two no longer exists (which is usually a far larger region than where it does).
I think they meant to say superfluid helium.
You do some pretty weird shit.
Oh, snaaaaaap.
Superfluid. It can be supercritical, but superfluid is the special thing for helium.
Unless its a hydrocarbon product, which can (and does) spread over surfaces it can’t mix with/soak into in single molecules thick sheets.
Aha! But languical constructs allow and do allow hyperboles! So it could be argued that the colleague asked for the minimum allowed by our bindings law!
I request a motion to dismiss your dismissal :>
It’d evaporate much quicker TBF. Although that also means that the BP would be much lower and tea and coffee wouldn’t be a thing and boiling wouldn’t be a reliable method of cooking. although on the flip side, you could increase the strength of alcoholic beverages by boiling the water off instead of distilling the alcohol.
Yep. Generally if one property of it was so different, I’d expect many others to be different as a result of that too. So physics and chemistry as we know them (with so many things relying on water) wouldn’t exist. And thinking further how life on Earth started off in the water…
We’re 60% water and not really water-tight as it is.
Would it still be possible to have a shower?
Yes. But you probably wouldn’t be alive.
at least it wouldn’t wet your socks. i think capillary action relies on surface tension
It relies on differences in surface tension. If a liquid has a lower surface tension (energy) towards one surface than another, you get the typical capillary effect. In the case of water, the water-air energy is lower than the water-<whatever your capillary is made of> energy, so you get a capillary effect.
If water had exactly zero surface tension against every interface,
- it would not exhibit any capillary action
- life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
- your socks would remain dry
life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
your socks would remain dry
life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
This was the first thought that came to my mind on seeing this post.
For starters, basicaly most (all?) land based plants are fucked, they can no longer internally hydrate, also water in soil behaves totally differently, so …yeah.
(oh on that note, snap your fingers and water has 0 surface tension? time for a lot of landslides/sinkholes in humid areas)
Then you’ve got beings with active circulatory systems, who… may to some extent be able to live, but lots of pulmonary / circulatory problems are gonna happen.
I guess maybe totally waterborne life could survive, maybe… but 0 surface tension of water probably changes how salinity works…
Yeah, this would be very bad, lol.
If we want to go to extremes, zero surface tension means no nucleation barrier for critical bubbles. In practice, this implies that liquid water is unstable, and will spontaneously vaporise at all conditions.
So yeah, all life ends pretty quickly.
Wow, that’s much worse lol!
That would actually be a very useful tool for machinists. I think it would make it much easier to find out how non-flat something it
I think that’s part of our anthropic bias, not sure we’d be alive without water’s surface tension in order to observe this.
Well cells wouldn’t be circle shaped, but would it actually be to the detriment of life in that or other ways?
Maybe cells could take a more pragmatic shape, like tactical dicks
I think that could make some life-supporting chemical reactions difficult to happen, but I’m not qualified to judge that.
Surface tension and reactions are manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. I’m certain that causing a change in one would also affect the other.
I don’t, not that I am qualified to say so either! The larger surface area might be beneficial for osmosis!
I’m also not qualified, but I do wonder whether releasing all that surface tension inside us would alleviate a lot of anxiety. I think yes.
I’m qualified, our brains would immediately stop functioning and that does tend to relieve anxiety.
Trees wouldn’t exist, so life would definitely look different.
What are you on about?
Capillary action doesn’t happen without surface tension, so long stemmed woody plants are out. Iirc, mushrooms were not super common before trees and spread by decomposing them, so those are gone too
Well if water didn’t have its unique properties of cohesion and adhesion we likely wouldn’t be here anyways.
The water would react similarly to alcohol. Yes, the puddle would be bigger but it would evaporate faster.
This reminds me of the person that suggested in a response to a request for ADHD “life-hacks” where they would wet one of their socks before starting a specific high-importance task and could not take it off until the specified task was completed.
That is a weapons-grade life hack right there.
I see, quite similar to the ol’ light-your-hair-on-fire-to-motivate-yourself-to-shower trick. Clever!
Goddamn. That’s some diabolical hack. I might give it a try.
Did someone say oxygen not included?
I read that in Meatwad’s voice.
made me reread it
Now think about what would happen if ice didn’t float.
The movie Titanic would be boring
I’m not a geologist, but I’m imagine that the deep ocean would be a colossal underwater glacier, with intermixed sedimentary layers. Kind of like what we have with methane hydrate deposits, only much, much deeper. The super-deep ocean simply wouldn’t exist, and we might not even know about the Mariana Trench, or a lot of other sea floor features. Also, it’s possible a different proportion of the world’s water would be frozen in this way.
With ice as a part of the sea floor, it would also interact with subduction zones at continental edges. That might push a LOT more superheated water into volcanoes, faults, and everywhere else water could go. That would probably make for a lot more geysers in such areas, and volcanic eruptions would be far more energetic.
The trajectory of human history and technology would also be changed. There might have been fewer ice bridges between continents during the last ice age. Ice-skating wouldn’t become as common a thing until we get refrigeration. Harvesting ice in the winter would require bodies of water to freeze solid first, making it impractical except in shallow areas.
I’m also going to wager that glaciers would behave differently too. I don’t know enough about their dynamics, but I wonder if having meltwater on the bottom helps lubricate their movements somewhat. Kind of like a lava flow, only slower. Inverting that relationship might make glaciers far less mobile.
Hmm, might small bodies of water, say pusdle to pond size, still freeze from the top down because of exposure to colder air and above freezing earth? If the top freezes over all at once it might stay on top unless something breaks it and allows water to flow from under to over
Yeah, not good. It’s kind of a weird quirk of nature that water is pretty unique in that it gets less dense when it’s a solid as well.
