Significance of water

Water is a zero calorie adhesive and cohesive chemical substance vital for all forms of life. Seventy one percent of the earth we know today happens to be covered with water in different forms and shapes, oceans, seas, rivers and clouds in which water could be either salt-water or polar ice caps maintaining thermal equilibrium and all forms of life. Life as we acknowledge cannot keep its course without that important element known to chemists as H2O the bonding of two hydregon atoms with an oxegyon atom forming a water molecule and to the simple public as that solvent used for cooking and cleaning needed for everyday life activities. Throughout the Dawn of history mankind has been continously searching for water resources essential not only for life but for civilization growth and prosper, evidently, history loudly speaks of human migration and conflicts due to water passages and resources seeked by succesive impires. The importance of water reaches out far beyond our humanistic food intake; it stretches out to influence economy, trade and agriculture. Trying to understand how could such a pure substance found on mother earth alter not only human life but existance would be merely an attempt to understand the universe around us. Water is formed as a byproduct of stars formation. Scientists believe that a series of outwards gas blasts released by the stars when born impacting the surrounding gas would produce water, Gary Melnick, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explains as such "For reasons that aren't entirely understood, when stars are born, their birth is accompanied by a strong outward wind of gas and dust. When this outflowing material eventually impacts the surrounding gas, the shock waves that are created compress and heat the gas. The water we observe is quickly produced in this warm dense gas." It wasn’t till the late seventeenth century when European scientists came to a somewhat clear perception of the origin of water and what is known as the water cycle. The water cycle consists of three components, the sea, the clouds and continental surface water such as springs and rivers. The main dilemma behind the water cycle was the consistancy of the sea level despite continuous inflow from the rivers. However, scientists like Galileo and Copernicus realized that such a consistancy is in great part due to the huge amount of evaporated sea water onto gas by the heat of the sun, a conclusion that was not accomidated by earlier scientists who assumed that seas covered only a limited surface area in a flat world. The perfect ordinates of earth with respect to the sun make it possible for water to take on the three solid, liquid, gaseous phases vital for life on earth. Each phase is determined by the internal temperature within molecules forming water, for instance, in the solid form of water, ice, molecules tend to bond closer together than the liquid or gaseous phase, and the internal temperature is very low due to the lack of heat generated by the motion of the molecules. Once heat is absorbed, then the internal temperature of the molecules would increase and the bonding would be not as tight giving the molecules flexibility to move around thus melting to the liquid phase. If more heat is absorbed, the bonding weakens even more, the movement of the molecules would be greater, and atoms would be further apart from each other consequently moving to the gaseous phase. This process of going from one phase to another is a reversible process in which vapor gas could go to liquid if condensed and solid if the internal temperature brought down enough to form an ice molecule, which could be a physical process of forcing the molecules to move closer to one another by applying pressure on the gas. The significance of water cannot be summarized in an article or a seminar due to human deep dependency on it in which it directly and indirectly affects our lives. It is important to realize that such a gift from God should be a common commodity available to all humanity; however, patronizingly a sense of carelessness is common amongst the public on the importance of water for our existence. Everything around us embedded with life needs water such as humans, animals, and plants. From the early days of humanity, humans from different ethnicities and backgrounds sought their food intake from either meat with its different forms including fish, vegetables, and fruit. All the aforementioned would require water to live and grow, for crops cannot harvest and produce if not watered, and animals cannot live without satisfying their thirst just as humans and thus life permanently crippled if water not present. Not only we would go thirsty for the rest of our lives and die due to dehydration, we would not find any food to eat as well. The human body is in continuous need of water for filtration and intoxication; nevertheless, it is important for maintaining personal hygiene required for a healthier body and social acceptance. Water resources constitute the blood flowing through the veins and the arteries of prosperous economies and civil growth. Agriculture is both explicitly and implicitly a function of water in which math determines the adequate amount of water needed to flourish crops, not too much to flood it and not too little to dry it. Many countries have agriculture as a primary or a secondary pillar of their economies and ensuring its progression is a must to keep their commerce booming; therefore, history is rich in examples of human migration to places where water is largely present. Major civilizations found their homes across the banks of rivers like the Pharos in Egypt across the Nile River, the Persians across the Tigress and the Euphrates in Iraq, the Romans, and the Ottomans across the Euphrates in Syria and modern day Turkey. None of these civilizations could have superseded if it was not to their rich vital water resources that enabled them to secure independency and solid grounds. Even today, superpowers tend to invest lots of money in purifying water and extracting it from different traditional and non-traditional sources. In the University of Chicago for example, a chemistry professor extracted water from waste defying his students by drinking it. In addition, the Saudi government has initiated a program of purifying water from the red sea. However, not all countries have the means or the tools to invest in newer technologies to provide its citizens with drinkable water, such as Jordan and some African states, possessing a crisis at times.