How would the world be different if water was as thick as syrup?
For this mind experiment, assume that all its other properties were intact – freeze at 0c, boil at 100c, etc., we’d drink it, etc. – the only thing different would be its viscosity
What would cargo ships look like?
Would plumbing be the same?
Rain gutters?
Streets after a rain?
Tides? Waves?
Glasses?
Blenders?
What do you think the biggest/most pervasive change to our world would be?
We wouldn’t be here to ask the question.
That we wouldn’t exist.
To put things into perspective:
To microscopic things like bacteria, microbes, and other such non-sense, water, as it is right now, is basically like syrup to them. They are so small and have such a low Reynold’s number, that they cannot stop “paddling,” for lack of a a better word, in the water or they’ll stop instantly. Things that small can’t afford to be stopped for too long before they die.
So if water were even thicker/more viscous, then these organisms couldn’t have existed in the first place, and never could have evolved into multi-celled life.
Now, one could make the argument that if it were more viscous, then some other organisms would have evolved to fill their place with different means of locomotion, energy storage, etc…, but there’s no guarantee they would ever survive, or evolve into higher forms of life.
You mean like “Swill” from the old SNL commercial?
They’d have to eliminate the high dive from the summer Olympics.
be a bitch to go scuba diving… :eek:
Tsunamis would be far more horrific. But they’d be easy to out run.
Aunt Jemimah thunderstorms are going to take some getting used to. So is Old Faithful and Yellowstone in general. A cruise vacation is going to require a bit more time off.
Laundry day would truly be laundry day.
Snow would hurt.
Windshield wipers would have to be heavy-duty.
Waterskis would have to be really wide.
Drinking glasses would stay the same, but straws might see more widespread use.
Really? I can’t imagine that it’s easy to suck syrup up a straw, though I suppose capillary action might pull it upwards easier. I think drinking glasses would look more like martini glasses, wide and shallow, because nothing will slosh out (water is viscous because it is polar, and polar liquids stick to glass) and the glass will be able to be drunk from easily.
Swimmers take a slimy dive for an experiment at the ‘U’ (Minnesota)
700 pounds of guar gum in 175,000 gallons of chlorinated water.
I’m not think syrup so much as, say, a thick shake. While it takes some suckage to drink a shake, that’s usually the easiest way to do it.
I’m curious just how gummy that is. Any chemists around who can put 2/3 oz of guar in a gallon of water and describe it?
It looks like it’s more slimy than syrup.
Look at the last picture.
I’m pretty sure beer would absolutely suck. That’s not a world I want to live in.
Guar gum comes in low, medium and high viscosity forms. There’s no way to figure viscosity without knowing which type was used. That said, 0.048% guar gum is not a particularly strong solution.
If water suddenly acquired the viscosity of syrup tomorrow, I suppose most animal life would die right away, of heart attacks or aneurysms or other blood-flow problems. Would plants survive, or would they no longer be able to draw moisture through their capillaries? I suspect Planet Jemima would probably be almost totally lifeless in short order, although there’d probably be some freaked-out strain of microbe just waiting for this opportunity to take over. Multicellular life on earth would be forced to evolve all over again, this time from hagfish acne.
I guess if water inside living creatures were excluded for some arcane reason, things would be a bit more manageable. I recall seeing an experiment where some sort of gelatinous chemical was added to the water in a swimming pool, with the result that people could just run barefoot across the surface-- but if they stopped, they instantly broke the surface tension and sank. That’d be an interesting way to spend a weekend at the lake.
*“Look, Mom, I’m Jesus! Lookee!”
“That’s nice, dear…”*
Likely this Cornstarch video.
The water inside living things is already thick and gooey. It’s loaded with proteins and sugars and membranes and all sorts of stuff. So unless it was made a lot gooeyer, cells would probably make out OK. Tall plants would probably die as their vascular system got messed up. Even the lowly bacteria might find themselves in trouble if the diffusion rate of essential elements from rock and soil slowed down enough.
According to the BBC quiz show QI, there was an entire swimming pool filled with the stuff once to test if someone could swim in syrup.
Perhaps the OP might have asked what would happen if some rich so and so had asked Slartibartfast for a planet with oceans of syrup.
Even smaller floods would end up in disaster like this..
