I'm not entirely sure why Father Thomas picked this topic, but I imagine that it is the combination of being perhaps the most familiar chemical to us.

When we think about molecules, water, I think, is one of those that we just encounter every day.

We may or may not think about it as a chemical, but as a substance is something we are really

familiar with. So that's good. You know, we all have this anchoring point in some sense,

since I know from experience that chemistry tends to not be the favorite subject of people

who are not chemists. So it's good to have this anchoring point, and we can start out from together.

But I imagine that another reason is that water is also pretty weird.

It is not, I mean, it might for us be a normal chemical in some sense,

but it is not one that follows the patterns of other molecules that we know in any

sort of readily discernible way. So we'll get into that a little bit, what it is that makes

water weird. And I think the final thing is that it's easy to forget that water, we know,

we no longer live in an Aristotelian universe where things have been here forever.

You know, water has to come from somewhere.

And it did come from somewhere.

It's actually pretty cool where it came from.

I'm not entirely sure if Father Thomas knew how cool it was when it asked me to do this.

But we will go through and talk about where our water actually comes from.

But I want to start with, and even when I would have made, sort of a fourth motivation,

which is that water is also, in one of those molecules that really connects chemistry and biology.

There is a reason that you can not go very long without water as an organism.

And it's not specific to us humans.

Wherever we look at cells, the building blocks of any living thing here on Earth,

...