Water, a story from H to O

In business, whoever owns the most shares in a company controls it. If water consulted with businessmen, mere accounting would reveal who owns you and the Earth. Water makes up 70 percent of the human body and of the planet Earth. In the molecular sense, water is the Chairman and CEO of your body and the planet it lives on. But this substance, imbued with power and grace, present in the tiniest droplets of our sweat, in life-giving currents in the lobes of our brains and cells, in the mighty oceans and lakes, in tempting amounts in artful vessels that quench our thirst, or in the thin spheres of whimsical soap bubbles, had majestic beginnings.

Water or H2O has two dates when it acquired its atomic credentials. This is because its two kinds of atoms, hydrogen and oxygen, did not graduate in the same instance. It was a while before they met and formed the molecule that flows within us and the planet.

Like many CEOs whose CVs are filled with credentials of where they came from, water has a fine molecular resume. Its two kinds of atoms, namely hydrogen and oxygen, came out of the most phenomenal and majestic universities — the Big Bang and the stars. Two atoms of hydrogen lock with one atom of oxygen to form water.

Hydrogen is the most ancient of water’s credentials, born from the Big Bang. It is made up of one proton and one electron (although a hydrogen atom can have a neutron or two but still retain its identity as hydrogen). Protons were born about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang but it was not until a hundred seconds after the Big Bang, in temperatures close to 3 billion degrees Celsius, did protons and neutrons combined to form the nucleus of atoms. But we all know that an atom is not an atom without electrons so only when the primordial soup had cooled to 4,000 degrees Celsius, did the positively charged proton capture the negatively charged electron. Thus, hydrogen, the element with one proton and one electron, was born.

If it were solely the Big Bang University, we still would not have had water. The conditions of the Big Bang allowed only for the making of atoms up to beryllium which has four protons. Oxygen, which has eight electrons, has yet to be made so where could this atomic credential have come out of?

When denser swirl of gases was created, gravity dominated to form stars where hydrogen fused to form elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen up to iron. After millions to billions of years, the hydrogen fuel in stars ran out, the stars collapsed in on themselves and in a spectacular death called a supernova, created elements heavier than iron like uranium.

So just like many molecules were formed as stars churned out more atoms, hydrogen met another hydrogen to form a bond between them and as they wandered in space, somehow met an oxygen atom to eyeball with.

The collisions which formed our planet 4.6 billion years ago held many of the compounds that have been formed by then in superheated magma until the collisions stopped. The Earth started to cool and many of these compounds, once trapped in the magma, including water, were released into the atmosphere. The sky held all that water for a while. And then in what could not have been just a day or even a month, the temperature cooled enough for water to turn into liquid and pour on the Earth. And poured it did. Thus, the mighty oceans were formed. It is now, by all measures, a water planet.

I end this column to sip from my cup of coffee, a gift from my Mom from Vietnam, a sea away from us. It is raining outside. I am a creature of water contemplating a watery planet. Water, my watery master. I hold your sway as you hold mine.

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