The Secret Life of Water
Understanding one of the universe’s great gifts
by Chip Walter
Every living thing on earth requires water. In the case of you and me, we need it because so much of us consists of it. For every pound of you, almost two-thirds is water. Not that this makes us unique among living things. A two-and-a-half-pound sheep requires 10 quarts of water a day. A tomato is pretty much all water — 95 percent. And your average bacterium is 75 percent H2O.
The reason life is so important to water is because it is where all living things came from, and all living things came from water because it covers 71 percent of the planet, most of it in oceans more than a mile deep. If we were given a second chance to name our world, any right-minded person would have called it Water rather than Earth, or maybe Aqua, Maji, Yann or any of the other names humans have devised to label it in time and place.
In the very first moments before the Big Bang, all of the molecular arrangements for making water were hidden but already in the works. Only ignition remained to be done. This was before molecules themselves existed to be arranged; a time when the universe was infinitely smaller than the tiniest atom, and more dense than any black hole, a singularity, pregnant with everything required to create the menagerie of outlandish objects that would arrive after…
