Air is funny. It moves around when it’s warmed and it slows down when it’s chilled. This results in all sorts of odd things happening, which most of the things that live on earth, surrounded by air, call “weather.” It includes all sorts of water (frozen solid and kept liquid) falling out of the sky via big clumps of vaporized water hanging about miles up in the air, swooshing and swooping sheets of air frisking about as they sweep from one bit of sky to another, and all manner of other things.
Most things that live on top of the earth spend their lives surrounded by air. Almost all of them need to breathe it to stay alive. It’s quite a bit like water then, except you can’t make snowballs out of it once it’s frozen. Also, the only things that can move around through air itself are the ones that have wings, and it’s a lot trickier to go about than moving through water, mostly because air is much thinner, and if you aren’t careful about flapping through it, you just fall and go thud, thwack, or thunk, depending on what you land on.
A really interesting thing about air is how thin it gets the higher up you go. Things can get dizzy and pass out and need oxygen tanks, and the boiling point of water drops, which makes it very difficult to hard-boil an egg on Mount Everest. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, the thing boiling the egg becomes very annoyed. Imagine if you’d dreamed all your life of having a boiled egg with toast on Mount Everest, but were too lazy to look up the troubles of boiling eggs at high altitudes, and then your dreams were crushed right at their very end. Actually, you’d probably deserve it; if you didn’t care enough to learn about it, it was probably just an idle whim that you obsessed over, most likely irritating everyone around you while identifying you as shallow and thoughtless. Shame on you. Unless you haven’t had this particular dream, in which case said shame is undeserved and may be ignored.
Air can be compressed, you know. You squeeze it until it’s under pressure, and then you can keep it in small containers. The one problem with this is that if the container gets punctured it sort of sprays everywhere very fast, which can be quite dangerous. Air isn’t the only gas that can be compressed, of course. Oxygen is often compressed, for use in scuba gear tanks, but not usually all by itself, for safety reasons. You can use air in a scuba tank too, of course, but if you go too deep you’ll suffer from nitrogen narcosis, act drunk, and possibly die, usually from acting drunk more than one hundred feet underwater, which most things think is fairly stupid.
Anyways, air is awfully important because it forms our planet’s atmosphere, and without that nothing would be alive at all, which would be pretty depressing, to say nothing of boring. There’d still be lots of interesting things around, but there’d be no one to talk about how interesting they are. If that isn’t boring, what is?
Water is like air: a thing to move through, a thing to live in. The things living in air dispute this sometimes. Water, they say, is plainly something, while air is more like nothing. Therefore, they say, when you live in water you’re living in the middle of something, while to live in air you’re living in nothing. What’s interesting is that these things often don’t realize that if they were right, they would be living a most empty and disjointed existence, with no connections whatsoever to one another. It’s thankful that air is something, then, even if it does mean that fish can choke on it. That’s another proof right there: how can you choke on nothing?
Anyways, water is something to live in, and it’s deliciously, fragrantly good at it. It supports and comforts, coddles and nourishes, and is much more exciting to splash around than air, which doesn’t really splosh well, or earth, which can take someone’s eye out. Also, if you live in water, a much more sizeable slice of the planet is open to you – not only is far more of the world water than land, but water has the great advantage of containing far more up-and-down-ish-ness, which makes it even roomier. On the downside of this is that most things prefer to stay within certain areas, but that’s the way life is anyways. It doesn’t like change, even if it spends its life looping from the north pole to the south pole all year. That’s not change, that’s habit.
Things that don’t live in water are pretty varied in how they treat it. Some of them don’t like it for any sort of reason (it makes their fur wet and damp, it’s full of things that think they taste nice, it’s hard to get around), and others like it quite a lot (it’s full of tasty things, it’s good for bathing in, it’s fun to splash at people). A lot of them could take it or leave it. However, they all need it to stay alive, so they all love it very much in at least one way.
Most of the water on the planet is saltwater, or seawater, which isn’t very good to drink, mostly because of its distressing tendency to kill things that try to get nourishment from it. Stick to freshwater. It’s much, much, much rarer, but it doesn’t kill you unless it’s contaminated, or boiling, or freezing, or you’re dropped into it from somewhere very high.
Water has quite a lot of ways to kill things, actually. If it’s too warm, you’re cooked by it, if it’s too cold, you freeze from it, and if it’s too full of things that find you toothsome, you’re eaten in it. That last one isn’t really water’s fault, though.
You can float some things on water, like most wood. Most rocks just sink, though – but not all rocks. Pumice floats in a most buoyantly exuberant manner.
Most of the things that live in the water have to stick to a certain shape, to allow them to move around properly. This happens because water’s much more solid than air, which of course makes most things think it’s nothing, as opposed to water being something. We already went over how silly this was, so I’m not going to do so again.
It’s widely agreed that all life on our planet started out in the water, as tiny little things and bits that lived only to produce more of themselves. That’s sort of like now, except scaled-down a little bit, for things.
Earth is a few things: a kind of soil, the planet we’re standing on, and what we’re going to call the ground, for the sake of simplicity. Actually, that’s just making a word with a complicated bunch of meanings more complicated, so it isn’t simple at all.
If it weren’t for earth, we wouldn’t have anything for water or air to cling to, which would mean we wouldn’t exist. Well, our atoms and molecules would, but they wouldn’t have much to do with us, unless you’ve always fancied yourself to have a strong resemblance to an interstellar dust cloud or asteroid. Most things don’t look like either of those, although there are always exceptions. A snapping turtle has a very bumpy shell that might look a bit like an asteroid to some things.
Nothing breathes earth, which makes it a little different from air or water. On the other hand, plenty of things live in it, and it gives vital nourishment to life, just like air and water. So it’s really pretty similar there.
Earth contains all sorts of interesting things, like metals. A certain kind of thing uses metals to make many objects, particularly ones to kill their fellow things. It’s all a bit strange, but they assure us that there’s a good reason.
One of the odder things about earth is that if you go down far enough, it’s revealed to be sitting on molten rock. It’s divided into huge, crusty, curmudgeonly plates that slide around whacking into one another, like very big and very old bumper cars, except not at all. Most things didn’t believe this at first when someone thought of it, but then they decided it was all right. Some of them still think it’s wrong, but they’re the same ones who think that the planet is only a tiny, tiny fraction of its actual age just because they said so, so we can ignore them. It’s good for us, and good for them too, so everyone comes out ahead if we do that.
Quite a lot of things live inside earth. Many of them have lots of legs, or no legs, or are microscopic. Actually, given the population of things on the planet, you’re unusual if you don’t have a lot of legs, but not nearly as unusual as if you aren’t microscopic. If you didn’t notice this, it’s probably because you aren’t microscopic, since things that aren’t like that have a bit of trouble seeing things that are.
Another important thing about earth is that most plants grow in it. Since plants take the gases things exhale, and turn them back into the gases they inhale, this is pretty important. This is also why chopping down enormous forests of plants is a little silly, because then we won’t have anything to breathe. This is quite related to air, when you think about it. Really, air, earth, and water are so tangled up that it’s amazing, but that’s how the planet works.
An important thing to note about earth is that although it has lots of nifty things in it (like metals and fossil fuels), it doesn’t have endless amounts of them. That would mean we would have an endless supply of earth, which would be quite stupid.
Well, that’s about it. If you thought I was going to put fire in here, you were wrong. The sun’s a big ball of fire that keeps us all alive, and the earth’s core is made of magma, but nothing lives on them, or in them. So it’s not here.
Did you notice how all the bits were connected to each other? It sort of happened that way, and it’s complicated. Sorry.
“On the Environment” copyright 2008, Jamie Proctor.