Water; as ice and in other forms (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 20, 2024, 20:28 (125 days ago) @ David Turell

A new review of it's importance for life to exist:

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/07/the-properties-of-water-point-to-intelligent-design/

"...I discussed concerned the transparency of water, facilitating the penetration of visual light through the aqueous cytoplasm of the cell to access the chloroplasts. There are, however, a plethora of other properties of water that appear to be uniquely fit to support life. Here, I shall survey a few of these.

"Unlike almost all other substances, water expands and becomes less dense in its solid form than it is in its liquid form. Ice has an open structure that is sustained by the hydrogen bonds between water molecules. If ice behaved like almost all other substances (a notable exception being the metal gallium, which also expands on freezing), it would sink to the bottom and the oceans would freeze from the bottom up, leading to much of our planet being permanently encased in ice — since the ice beneath the water would be shielded from the warmth of the sun’s rays. Since ice expands upon freezing, however, it insulates the water beneath the surface, keeping it in its liquid form.

***

"Water is also a nearly universal solvent, and this property is critical to its role in dissolving minerals from the rocks. Indeed, almost all known chemicals dissolve in water to at least some extent. The solubility of carbon dioxide in water and its reaction with water to yield carbonic acid also promotes chemical reactions with these minerals, increasing their solubility.

"Water also has an extremely high surface tension (second only to mercury of any common fluid). As water is drawn into fissures (because of its high surface tension) and expands upon freezing, the surrounding rocks are split open, thereby conferring a greater surface area for chemical weathering.

"For life on land to thrive, the dissolved minerals also must be deposited on land, which is made possible by the hydrological cycle whereby the water from the oceans evaporates into the atmosphere and returns to the ground as rain or snow. The hydrological cycle is itself made possible by water’s existence in three states (solid, liquid, and gas) in the range of ambient temperatures at the earth’s surface. This ability to exist in three different states at the ambient conditions at the earth’s surface is unique among all known substances.

***

“'It cannot be doubted that if the vehicle of the blood were other than water, the dissolved substances would be greatly restricted in variety and in quantity, nor that such restriction must needs be accompanied by a corresponding restriction of life processes.”

"Another characteristic of water is that its viscosity is one of the lowest of any known fluid. The pressure that is needed to pump a fluid increases proportionally with its viscosity. Therefore, if the viscosity of water were significantly increased, it would become prohibitively difficult to pump the blood through the circulatory system... The viscosity of a fluid is also inversely proportional to its diffusion rate, and so increasing the viscosity of water would have a significant impact on the rate of diffusion from capillaries to the cells of the body.

***

"Another remarkable feature of water is its evaporative cooling effect. As water evaporates from an object’s surface, the molecules with more kinetic energy escape as a gas, whereas those with lower kinetic energy remain in liquid form. This serves to reduce the surface temperature. The evaporative cooling effect of water is in fact higher than that of any other known molecular liquid — i.e., compounds composed of two or more types of atoms. This characteristic of water is particularly important for warm-blooded organisms when the external temperature is warmer than their core body temperature and thus the excess heat cannot be radiated out into the environment. Instead, excess heat is lost through the evaporative cooling effect of water, maximized by numerous sweat glands on the skin surface."

Comment: this is another fine-tuning issue added to all the other points. In the article's conclusion we have this: "it becomes increasingly difficult to deny what Fred Hoyle called a “common sense interpretation of the facts,” namely, “that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” Same Fred Hoyle who named the Big Bang.