Hi, We are the Water family. My name is Hydrogen and me and my twin brother live with our father Oxygen.
He is a police man and he adopted us when my mother Methane got burned in a horrible fire.
There are many single father families just like ours all over the world covering 75% of the earth's surface. 12 billion light years away is a gigantic cloud of water vapor containing 140 trillion times more water than found in all of Earth's oceans. The closest source of water to earth is a 100 km deep subsurface ocean on one of Jupiter's moons called Europa.
Our family is very neutral as far as the acids and bases are concerned and we are proud of it. We are tasteless, odorless, transparent, and because of that we are full of light and life. We get along with many other families like salts, sugars, acids, bases, proteins and even with the funny dry ice family called CO2 who gives us all bubbles and calcium carbonate (CaCO3) who makes us hard. Despite being regarded as the best solvents around, we do not get along or mix with the Fats and Oils at all.
When we are with the salts we stay awake as water longer, and do not fall asleep and freeze into ice so fast as we normally do. When we are high on the mountain tops, we dream into our gas state much faster than we normally would. It is as if the heights and the emptiness above leads us up to the clouds to dream.
We floated up in the air like a balloon and landed on a speck of dust. We were welcomed on cloud 9. We were told that we successfully evaporated from the ocean and that our next destination would be a few days travel. The wind was blowing us to the watershed of Europe called the Swiss Alps.
When we finally arrived a few day later, we were happy to have a soft landing as part of a beautiful snow flake instead of a splash in a rain drop or a crash in hail.
We landed on a glacier where we rested a while in on a rock helping to crack it open.
We did this because when we went to sleep and became ice, we became bigger and floated.
By floating on top of lakes as ice, we were like a blanket protecting the fish in the water. By floating on top as clouds, we were protecting the animals on land.
We eventually cracked that rock got so tired that we melted. Our next stop was a lake called "Watershed" where we ended up underground again for a while where it got really hot.
We escaped going thru a spa but got sucked up by a sucking machine called a water pump.
We were holding on to other water families and others were holding on to us. There is a limit to our strength and holding 10 meters worth of water families is our limit. Had the well been any deeper, we could not have gotten out.
The pump pumped us into a steam locomotive and we got to give it a push as they heated us till we boiled into steam and had a dream we were pushing a train.
We woke up on a blade of grass next to the train tracks.
A cow eventually ate us and eventually pissed us out into a puddle that trickled into a pond that seeped into a stream which flowed thru a lake into a river that emptied into the sea.
We arrived just in time for the last performance of the show called "Tides". As the moon slowly pulled us higher and higher the tensions rose. And when we got as high as we could get, we started to fall. Everyone screeched like they were on a roller coaster ride. We nearly stayed another day for the next ride but were totally captivated by all the salt that suddenly joined us praising us for being such good solvents.
Being good solvents mean that humans use us to clean their shit that ends up polluting their back yard. But their back yard is where they get their drinking water from. The human body contains 75% water and depending on activity and temperature requires 1-7 liters or kilogram of clean fresh water per day to function properly.
About a billion people around the world routinely drink unhealthy water. Poor water quality and bad sanitation are deadly; some five million deaths a year are caused by polluted drinking water. 1.4 million children die from diarrhea each year at a rate of 160 each hour because of lack of clean water.
People who live in the desert, high up on mountains or on land suffering a drought, suffer from an acute shortage of local fresh water despite its abundance in the oceans. People living in high populated environments have their water chlorinated and are forced to buy fresh water that is bottled and expensive.
It can be foreseen that one day countries will fight wars over fresh water, like they now fight wars over oil.
But the wars will be fought over higher stakes. A liter of fresh mineral water costs more than a liter of oil. Oil is vital for machines but water is vital for life.
THE END
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