Is there a way to destroy water? End the cycle. No turning into any other element, just gone.
In: Planetary Science
You can’t “destroy” anything. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed.
Genuinely curious. What about bottled water that is never opened again? Like the thousands of cases they found in abandoned schools in Flint? They’re still sitting in bottles unopened, thus preventing them from being put back into the water cycle. They aren’t *gone* perse, but no longer included in the cycle…
The simplest, most practical, way to do what you’re asking is throwing the water into a black hole, this is not easy to do from earth but is something you can do with large volumes of water if you need to (maybe the water is cursed or something?)
The second way is matter-antimatter anihilation. At the moment we are only able to create small numbers of anti-hydrogen atoms that would anihilate the hydrogen in the water molecules you supply, the issue is you’d be left with oxygen that could react with hydrogen again in the future, regenerating the water (it wouldn’t technically be the same water but it would be 8/9 the same as before by mass). So we’d have to invent anti-oxygen generation (this would be incredibly difficult) AND even if we’d succeed we wouldn’t be able to create macroscopic quantities of either because in the process of doing that we’d be creating a lot of antimatter that would anihilate matter it encounters (in our devices), if these are macroscopic quantities in a short time the outcome is effectively a nuclear explosion
Every part of our existence depends on the “destruction” of water. Hydrolysis is a crucial step in photosynthesis. We breathe the waste product, oxygen, and the hydrogen is used to power the processes that plants need to make energy, grow and function. As well as breathing oxygen, we eat plants, or eat animals that eat plants.
So yes, water molecules are often “destroyed”, but only into their constituents, hydrogen and oxygen.
What do you have against water?
Why would you want to do that?
Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Not by us, anyway. Not currently. And some would argue that the equality E=MC2 is proof of that, in that matter and energy are two forms of the same thing. We can obtain/harvest energy from matter by breaking bonds or, in the case of fusion, creating new ones, but the matter mostly remains.
Plants use the energy from sunlight to turn water air into sugar and a different type of air. The water is destroyed in the process.
So, a way to destroy the hydrogen and oxygen.
Nuclear fusion and fission definitely do not count, as it’s also transforming the nucleons in another element.
Even if you could destroy the protons and neutrons, that would just release more matter and energy in the process.
Therefore, the answer is no. Nothing in the universe can be “just gone”, it can only transform.
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