How life would be on Earth if the properties of water are different?

Question

It's my assignment and i guess i've written all i can think of... so i want other's point of view

Answer 1

This would depend upon the properties of water that you are looking at. A small change in some of the properties would probably prevent life from existing (for example if water froze 20 degrees Celsius higher than it does).

Start with the Density: 1.00 g/mL (or CC) at 4 degree Celsius. Heavy enough to allow buoyancy but not do dense at to keep everything floating. This is especially important for aquatic life forms which could not exist if they always fell to the bottom of the ocean or floated to the surface.

The Viscosity is 1.002 centipoise at 20°C. Again this is convenient because it allows some resistance but is not as thick as "maple syrup in winter." The viscosity allows swimming and other forms or motivation.

The Heat Capacity of 4.22 kJ/kg.K allows warm blooded creatures to store a great amount of heat in a relatively small space.

The high Dielectric Constant of 78.54 at 25°C allows for water to be use a solvent of ionic compounds, many of which will dissolve in nothing else.

A Melting (Freezing) point of 0.0 degrees Celsius is below the maximum density (at 4 degrees) making ice float on liquid water. This prevents ponds and lakes from freezing solid during winter (which might kill everything in them).

These are just a few, but are the most obvious ones.

Answer 2

One of the most important properties of water is that it is a very polar molecule. As a result, it has things like hydrogen bonds that give it a high boiling point, heat capacity, and surface tension. It also allows it to dissolve a lot of other molecules. If you changed that one property, its polarity, then it would be catastrophic for life on Earth.

First, all of the water would probably evaporate. That would leave no place for most of the original creatures to live. Also, since water is the solvent for all of the biological molecules in creatures and even in the cell, those molecules would have no way to travel and do their business. Trees and other plants would have no way to draw water into them because capillary action would not work.

Perhaps life would find some other similarly useful molecule, but since the abundance of such molecule would likely be small, that life would be restricted to very small parts of the planet.

Maybe some sort of self-assembling electronic-like solid-state creatures would have developed instead, but it's rather unlikely. Just speculating :)

Answer 3

Water undergoes a type of bonding called hydrogen bonding, which gives it very special properties. Without this, no life would exist on earth.

For example, water would probably be steam at room temperature, meaning we couldnt drink it.

Ice would be just as dense as water, making it sink rather than float. As a result, lakes would freeze from the bottom up, killing all water creatures.

Water also wouldn't have surface tension.

Answer 4

if the properties of water were different then it wouldn't be water anymore, it would be a different substance. as for life, who knows? life as we understand it is water based but who's to say that another liquid compound couldn't be the basis for a different kind of life, like liquid ammonia? that life would live in a cold environment

Answer 5

Life would be different or non existing. If water frezes at -20 degree F then we will be living in mars. or if it frezes at 70 degree F then we would be living in mercury. You could work on the paper in those angle etc.