How would life be without water?

08 Apr How would life be without water?

Written by Aryan Dhar, Grade 10 student, SNIS.

Any form of life on Earth would be impossible to sustain without the availability of water, as it plays such a significant role in our day to day lives. About 70% of the human body comprises of water and 75% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, which forms our oceans and seas.

Without water, humans wouldn’t have seen the dawn of civilisations like the Indus Valley Civilisation and the Egyptian Civilisation, which heavily depended on water for their livelihood. The Indus River and Nile River served as a means of irrigating vast farmlands of these agrarian societies, which helped them thrive and modernise over a period of time.

Due to rapid advancements in science and technology, we can now make use of water to harness renewable sources of energy such as electricity, known as hydroelectricity. In the absence of water, many places that solely rely on hydroelectricity would perish, as life without electricity in this era is out of the question. However, this would not affect most of the human population at this point in time, but it will in the future, as most of the electricity generated today is done so by the burning of fossil fuels, which is rapidly depleting. When all fossil fuels are used up, there would be no clean alternative source for humans to turn to for generating electricity.

Without seas and oceans or with extremely polluted seas and oceans, all aquatic and marine life would become extinct, as almost all these aquatic organisms need clean water to survive. As a result, regions whose primary source of food comes from the sea, would suffer.

70% of the human body is water. Humans are believed to only be able to survive about 3 days without water. So, if all the water was to disappear, we would shrink by about 70% of our mass, reducing us to just skin and bones.

All in all, if there is no water available, all life forms on Earth would simply cease to exist.

So what can we do to save ourselves and our race? Awareness is the key. Bringing awareness to children, as they are the future, is important. Our school curricula need to focus on educating children from a very early age on our current state and ways in which we can conserve water. One example is Sharanya Narayani International School, one of Bangalore’s leading International Schools, where students are instilled with the thought that water is a precious natural resource and should not be wasted. Additionally, being a green campus, the school has taken many steps to recycle water, by the means of rainwater harvesting, decreasing the flow of water from taps and installing a Sewage Treatment Plant to cleanse used water so that it can be reused for purposes such as gardening, cleaning and many others.

“Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children’s lifetime. The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land.”