What would happen if air was denser than water
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What would happen if air was denser than water

[From: ] [author: ] [Date: 11-12-25] [Hit: ]
. there would be implications concerning the structural integrity of, well, us.Ignoring that, I suppose the oceans,......
Just curious.

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Well, I'm pretty sure, when you ignore the physics-breaking dangers to the universe...

Since we are, err, made of water... there would be implications concerning the structural integrity of, well, us.

Ignoring that, I suppose the oceans, etc, would rise, including the ice caps, and block out the sun... There would, of course, be mass panic on the part of citizenry, and there would be many fatalities just by that. Eventually, without the constant negative entropy from the sun, all life would die.

Assuming there is enough negative entropy for society to exist for a reasonable time, I suppose factions would rise out of the inevitable anarchy, and we would revert to being basically militaristic, defending and collecting the resources from the previous society, i.e., us.

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So as a mathematician, whenever someone asks a "what if" question, my immediate reaction is not to think of "what would this imply", but "what would cause such a change, and what would that cause, itself, imply". I've discovered this is a pretty fun way to approach them, and one that a lot of people often ignore, so let's see where this gets us.

I'm going to take your question at literal value, and make the density of water greater, rather than the density of air smaller.

If we consider the composition of air, we have (mostly) nitrogen and oxygen. Let's assume that both of these are denser, so that we can ignore changes that would happen in the percentages otherwise, also to minimize the problems we're going to cause.

The primary reason that gases are so "spread out" is because they are moving "too fast." So if we want the density of air to be greater, we need to slow down the particles. That means Earth would have a smaller, colder atmosphere.

So there are a couple ways we might cause this to happen. We might want air to have a greater "resistance" [I do not know the proper name for this] to the energy input: We can't change that temperature is proportional to kinetic energy unless we really want to have a bad day, but we can change the constant of proportionality somehow, so that's an option. Alternatively, and less catastrophically, we could just decrease the power output of the sun, which would really only screw with the biology on our planet.


In short: The best case scenario is life does not exist on Earth. A possible worst case scenario could happen if we just make oxygen extremely dense, rather than all the non-trace gases. I don't know enough biology but that would surely screw with the idea of respiration a bit, I'd think.

(In case this wasn't clear, the reason the second one is worse than the first one is because the first probably only eliminates the possibility of life on Earth, whereas the second threatens the possibility of cells as we know them existing at all)

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water would rise above air, nothing would work really, we wouldn't be able to survive.

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the sky would be water and the sea would be the air.

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evreything would die i think

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we're gonna be fishes!
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