Just Enough Water

[KilljoyKlown]

The following link is the most complete information about water that I have ever seen. Also did a search on "What if ice was heavier than water" and all the answers I read agreed with what I said on that subject.

http://www.enotes.com/topic/Water

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

With more water, there would be more habitat for sea life. I don't see how it's such a fine balance. At times there was less and at other times there was more, depending on how much was frozen.

Until very recently (in cosmic terms) all life on earth was aquatic.

Even today, two entire kingdoms of organisms (out of six), the algae and the archaea, consist entirely of aquatic species.

 

[Aqueous Id]

I dispute that there is just enough of anything on earth.

The amount of everything on earth was just as much as provided by the raw materials from which earth was formed, and by all the complex processes that converted those raw materials, through successive stages of planetary evolution, to the various amounts present in the various geologic periods of change.

In the Archaen eon, ending 2.5 billion years ago there was "just enough" oxygen in the atmosphere to usher in a huge change, after almost one billion years of building the oxygen atmosphere by cyanobacteria that formed mats covering the earth.

Where did that oxygen come from? Photosynthesis. The organisms reduced the CO2 content of the primordial atmosphere, which also was high in methane and ammonia. Any system capable of altering the atmosphere on this scale, over approx. 1 billion years, would invariably be capable of altering the water content of the oceans.

So I disagree that there was just enough of anything. Concentrations are the result of reactions and equilibrium. Stuff happens. The earth changes, and drastically. Some of those changes have included mass extinctions, for which "enough water" could not save the dying species.

It's random, it's stochastic, it's process-driven, it's everything except created by design. You can't get there, you can never get there from here, here in the real world of facts and evidence.

 

[KilljoyKlown]

I dispute that there is just enough of anything on earth.

The amount of everything on earth was just as much as provided by the raw materials from which earth was formed, and by all the complex processes that converted those raw materials, through successive stages of planetary evolution, to the various amounts present in the various geologic periods of change.

In the Archaen eon, ending 2.5 billion years ago there was "just enough" oxygen in the atmosphere to usher in a huge change, after almost one billion years of building the oxygen atmosphere by cyanobacteria that formed mats covering the earth.

Where did that oxygen come from? Photosynthesis. The organisms reduced the CO2 content of the primordial atmosphere, which also was high in methane and ammonia. Any system capable of altering the atmosphere on this scale, over approx. 1 billion years, would invariably be capable of altering the water content of the oceans.

So I disagree that there was just enough of anything. Concentrations are the result of reactions and equilibrium. Stuff happens. The earth changes, and drastically. Some of those changes have included mass extinctions, for which "enough water" could not save the dying species.

It's random, it's stochastic, it's process-driven, it's everything except created by design. You can't get there, you can never get there from here, here in the real world of facts and evidence.

What you said does make sense. The only thing we know for sure is that there was enough water to get us to where we are today. It may be awhile before we know if worlds with more or less water will support life, and then again whether that life will become intelligent.

 

[Thdaoub]

With more water, the ocean will be more vibrant with life, the forests will be more green.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

With more water, the ocean will be more vibrant with life . . . .

Life in the ocean is concentrated at its boundaries, where it touches the land: the shores and the bottom. The continental shelves, where neither the shoreline nor bottom are very far away, are the zones with the densest ecosystems. The oceans could be twice as deep and it would not make an enormous difference in the number of organisms living in it. On the contrary, a cataclysmic increase in vulcanism, resulting in the formation of thousands of new islands, would create new habitats for sea life. Even artificial and accidental reefs do that. Even the Great Floating Pacific Trash Dump (if I have named it correctly) does that. Even ships accrete barnacles.

. . . . the forests will be more green.

As I noted earlier, there were no forests, no terrestrial plants at all, in fact no terrestrial life at all, for billions of years, when there was just as much water as there is today. Organisms first had to evolve that could extract the CO2, and/or the other chemicals their metabolism required, from an environment that was not predominantly water.