Yep. Generally if one property of it was so different, I'd expect many others to be different as a result of that too. So physics and chemistry as we know them (with so many things relying on water) wouldn't exist. And thinking further how life on Earth started off in the water...

Yes and no. No surface tension implies vanishing intermolecular forces, so the liquid would not be cohesive and would expand in all directions to the volume of the room... which is pretty much the definition of a gas. Not quite though: supercritical fluids also do this as long as temperature and pressure remain high enough, and are indeed useful in niche applications industrially.

Liquid with low to none surface tension? Relatively possivle, tensioactives and additives within soaps and washing up liquids can do that.

And lakes affected by this are biologically damaged or dead, as surface tension is essntial to life.

Edit: that line is something they would absolutely add to an ATHF episode, but the consequences would be absurd as usual.

You can not "make" a given liquid like that but there are some liquids with low surface tension. From the back of my head I remember the Avogadro experiment, but to lazy to look it up. What I recall is that he "counted" the amount of particles in a drop of oil because it forms a mini layer of lying on top of water. You might notice when you drop a bit of oil in water, that it always creates a giant puddle.

Back to the original post: that thin layer of water would just evaporated instantly

Now imagine what wonders we could have if there were a few other quicky molecules.

Yes. But you probably wouldn't be alive.

Yeah, I'll often spread spilled water across the table just so that it evaporates within a couple minutes.

wetter water

supercritical helium does some really weird shit, I'd call this one plausible.

When some spiders are born, sometimes hundreds at a time, they cast little parachute webs and ride the wind to wherever they might go.

Palmetto bugs are like mean flying roaches that bite.

You’ll never escape the horrors of the beauty in nature.

It relies on differences in surface tension. If a liquid has a lower surface tension (energy) towards one surface than another, you get the typical capillary effect. In the case of water, the water-air energy is lower than the water- energy, so you get a capillary effect.

If water had exactly zero surface tension against every interface,

• it would not exhibit any capillary action
• life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
• your socks would remain dry

Goddamn. That's some diabolical hack. I might give it a try.

I see, quite similar to the ol’ light-your-hair-on-fire-to-motivate-yourself-to-shower trick. Clever!