Water, water everywhere
Published 1 year, 8 months ago in My life.Water is easily the most precious and possibly the weirdest stuff on the planet, yet we pay it very little attention and get it virtually for free.
Liquid gold from the bargain basement
1000litres = one cubic metre = 1000kg
1000litres of crude oil (6.3 barrels) costs about $363
1000litres of milk costs about $1000
1000litres of petrol costs between $1100 and $1600
1000kg of gold costs about $28,000,000 (at $US642 per fine ounce)
One cubic metre of sand costs about $60.
There is nothing on that list that we cannot live without.
According to my water bill, 1000litres of water costs about 82 cents. The most precious stuff on the planet and we pay 82 cents for 1000litres. I could be mad, but I think that’s insane.
If you read no further, and I don’t blame you, answer me this. Should we pay more for water? How much would you be willing to pay?
Life’s element
Nothing can live without water. Even bacteria, the hardiest of life’s menagerie, need water. With just a little moisture bacteria can live in temperatures cold enough to kill a penguin and hot enough to roast a pig, they can live in concentrations on sulphuric acid strong enough to dissolve metal and withstand ocean-bottom pressures that would make a sperm whale pop. But they cannot live without water. Nor can penguins, pre-roasted pigs, sperm whales or people. The existence of life on Earth is entirely due to the chemistry and peculiar properties of water.
Weird, wonderful water.
Water can cool you down or scold you, it can quench your thirst or it can drown you, it can carve canyons in mountains, it can tear down cliffs and shape continents, it’s proximity can inspire great poets and add several zeros to the value of your real estate. But these are the least of waters wonderful weirdnesses.
Combine one big oxygen atom with two small hydrogen atoms and you get liquid water. Combine the same two hydrogen atoms to any of the things close to oxygen on the period table - nitrogen, fluorine, phosphorus, sulfur or chlorine – and you might expect to get liquid something. But you don’t, you get a gas. That’s weird.
Water is a fantastic solvent, which makes it very useful for everything from industrial applications to diluting expensive scotch or red cordial and allowing your cells and mine to do the millions of things they do to keep us alive.
Most of water’s other physical properties – inexplicable things like specific heat and surface tension - have values far higher or lower than those of any other known material. The real kicker for me though is the fact that when it freezes, it expands. That is truly weird. Freeze anything else and it will constrict, its density will increase and it will sink. Not so water. Ice, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, floats. If you’ve never looked at an ice-block floating in a glass of water and said wow, say it now – wow! Really. If ice didn’t float lakes, rivers and indeed oceans would freeze from the bottom up and that would be very bad news. The world would freeze, forever.
I don’t really understand why or how water does the things it does but it does do them and it’s just as well because if it didn’t we’d be buggered.
Water, water everywhere
Water really is everywhere. Living things are largely made of it. You are 65 per cent water. There are about 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water on the planet. From what I understand there will never be any more or less than that. You and I drink the same water that the dinosaurs drank. 1.3 billion cubic kilometers is a lot, more than enough to go around, but 97 per cent of it is in the seas and sea water is, to us at least, poisonous. Drink enough sea water and the cells of your body will shrivel and your kidneys will shut down. Then you will die. Make it a rule. Don’t drink sea water.
Most of the rest of the world’s water is trapped in ice sheets. Only 0.036 per cent is available to us from lakes, rivers and reservoirs – still a whopping amount of water, but little enough that we really should pay it more attention.
There’s one good thing about drought.
It has a way of catching our attention.
How much would you pay for water?
2 Responses to “Water, water everywhere ”
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Once again a great post, as Dr. J. S. Miller used to say “why is it so”, without surface tension we wouldn’t have waves, nothing would float, we couldn’t dry ourselves with a towel, just take away one small characteristic of this amazing stuff and you change a million other things.
Water, like love and fresh air, should be free. As you’ve said so yourself, it’s everywhere. It is one of the foundations of life and was available from the beginning of time to give and sustain life. And, we would have had enough to keep having it for free too if we didn’t ruin the environment, mis-use the rivers, clogged up the lakes and re-direct its natural flow through the land. So now, we have to pay and pay dearly. But because everyone, rich or poor, needs water to survive, if you make it too expensive, only the poor suffer. One day, we will have to pay for fresh air too….