It’s the little things

It would instead instantly make it extremely obvious how uneven my floor is.

It'd evaporate much quicker TBF. Although that also means that the BP would be much lower and tea and coffee wouldn't be a thing and boiling wouldn't be a reliable method of cooking. although on the flip side, you could increase the strength of alcoholic beverages by boiling the water off instead of distilling the alcohol.

Yep. Generally if one property of it was so different, I'd expect many others to be different as a result of that too. So physics and chemistry as we know them (with so many things relying on water) wouldn't exist. And thinking further how life on Earth started off in the water...

We're 60% water and not really water-tight as it is.

Would it still be possible to have a shower?

Yes. But you probably wouldn't be alive.

Can we make liquids like that? Sounds useful in some situations.

Yes and no. No surface tension implies vanishing intermolecular forces, so the liquid would not be cohesive and would expand in all directions to the volume of the room... which is pretty much the definition of a gas. Not quite though: supercritical fluids also do this as long as temperature and pressure remain high enough, and are indeed useful in niche applications industrially.
Liquid with low to none surface tension? Relatively possivle, tensioactives and additives within soaps and washing up liquids can do that.

And lakes affected by this are biologically damaged or dead, as surface tension is essntial to life.

Edit: that line is something they would absolutely add to an ATHF episode, but the consequences would be absurd as usual.
You can not "make" a given liquid like that but there are some liquids with low surface tension. From the back of my head I remember the Avogadro experiment, but to lazy to look it up. What I recall is that he "counted" the amount of particles in a drop of oil because it forms a mini layer of lying on top of water. You might notice when you drop a bit of oil in water, that it always creates a giant puddle.

Back to the original post: that thin layer of water would just evaporated instantly
- wouldn't it also be impossible to drink? The water would just seep out of any cup and find the path of least resistance to the floor
  
  At least with oil you can just raw dog the nozzle and squeeze it directly in, guzzling down those calories by the gallon at least until the attendant starts to run over, but by then you pull out your lighter threateningly and shake your head until he backs off again
- So it would actually be more practical, don't need to mop it up if it evaporates.

if we lived in a high pressure environment, this totally would happen.

We would not have life! Water is a polar molecule that is very different from most other liquids. Its the specific surface tension properties that help to create life. The reason why we search for planets with water. We've never worked out a way for any life to exists without the amazing H2O.

Now imagine what wonders we could have if there were a few other quicky molecules.
- Every molecule is quirky in its own way..
What if it just applied to chlorinated tap water then
- As an odd thought experiment or are we hoping that the laws of physics might be different there? All water, except brand new in reaction space is almost certainly going to contain dissolved ions

You can add a wetting agent to water to decrease the surface tension

wetter water
- I know a guy who drank some WaterWetter and got pretty sick. He was an idiot.
- Add more water

wouldn't this evaporate extremely quick though?

Yeah, I'll often spread spilled water across the table just so that it evaporates within a couple minutes.
- Must be nice living somewhere dry. I’d just end up with a moldy table a day later.

For a liquid to be a liquid, rather than a gas, it needs to be held together by intermolecular forces. Which means it will have some amount of surface tension. I therefore dismiss this hypothetical as physically unrealistic! :P

supercritical helium does some really weird shit, I'd call this one plausible.
- Supercritical fluids are more like a gas than a liquid. Their lack of surface tension means they'll diffuse throughout whatever container you put them in, so they can't really be "poured" like a liquid can. They're actually a pretty good example of why liquids need surface tension to be liquid.
- Superfluid. It can be supercritical, but superfluid is the special thing for helium.
- You do some pretty weird shit.
- supercritical
  
  does some really weird shit
  
  I'm no geologist, but I could have guessed that without any further specifics 😉
Unless its a hydrocarbon product, which can (and does) spread over surfaces it can't mix with/soak into in single molecules thick sheets.
Aha! But languical constructs allow and do allow hyperboles! So it could be argued that the colleague asked for the minimum allowed by our bindings law!

I request a motion to dismiss your dismissal :>

look....I'm just glad roaches don't have sharp teeth and spiders can't fly.

let's stop while we're ahead

When some spiders are born, sometimes hundreds at a time, they cast little parachute webs and ride the wind to wherever they might go.

Palmetto bugs are like mean flying roaches that bite.

You’ll never escape the horrors of the beauty in nature.
- Let's stop ~~while we're ahead~~
- “Palmetto bugs” are just roaches, period. That name refers to either the Florida woods cockroach or the American cockroach.

The water would react similarly to alcohol. Yes, the puddle would be bigger but it would evaporate faster.

at least it wouldn’t wet your socks. i think capillary action relies on surface tension

It relies on differences in surface tension. If a liquid has a lower surface tension (energy) towards one surface than another, you get the typical capillary effect. In the case of water, the water-air energy is lower than the water-<whatever your capillary is made of> energy, so you get a capillary effect.

If water had exactly zero surface tension against every interface,

it would not exhibit any capillary action

life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly

your socks would remain dry
- life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
  
  This was the first thought that came to my mind on seeing this post.
  
  For starters, basicaly most (all?) land based plants are fucked, they can no longer internally hydrate, also water in soil behaves totally differently, so ...yeah.
  
  (oh on that note, snap your fingers and water has 0 surface tension? time for a lot of landslides/sinkholes in humid areas)
  
  Then you've got beings with active circulatory systems, who... may to some extent be able to live, but lots of pulmonary / circulatory problems are gonna happen.
  
  I guess maybe totally waterborne life could survive, maybe... but 0 surface tension of water probably changes how salinity works...
  
  Yeah, this would be very bad, lol.
- life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
  
  your socks would remain dry

we also wouldn't have icicles :(

Well if water didn't have its unique properties of cohesion and adhesion we likely wouldn't be here anyways.

Would that mean that if you jumped into the Atlantic you'd just fall to the bottom? Or would that be due to buoyancy or something

Buoyancy (different densities).
- I'm really dense though

That's how gasoline spills (on water) work. They cover the water about one molecule thick.

So you’re saying my floor needs to be water?

Then your cells would die and plants wouldn't exist

This reminds me of the person that suggested in a response to a request for ADHD “life-hacks” where they would wet one of their socks before starting a specific high-importance task and could not take it off until the specified task was completed.

Goddamn. That's some diabolical hack. I might give it a try.
I see, quite similar to the ol’ light-your-hair-on-fire-to-motivate-yourself-to-shower trick. Clever!
That is a weapons-grade life hack right there.

Bold of you to assume my floor is level.

The floor couldn't be level, it would have to have a spherical diameter equal to the distance of your floor to the centre mass of the Earth.
Not only that, but level with 2 micrometers tolerance is something only specialized CNC milling workbenches achieve
Yeah, that guy must have a really flat floor

I think that's part of our anthropic bias, not sure we'd be alive without water's surface tension in order to observe this.

Well cells wouldn’t be circle shaped, but would it actually be to the detriment of life in that or other ways?

Maybe cells could take a more pragmatic shape, like tactical dicks
- Trees wouldn’t exist, so life would definitely look different.
- I think that could make some life-supporting chemical reactions difficult to happen, but I'm not qualified to judge that.

At 2 micrometers, it’s going to evaporate too fast for there to be a ~~puddle~~ thin film of water.

Oh! The humidity!

Now think about what would happen if ice didn't float.

I'm not a geologist, but I'm imagine that the deep ocean would be a colossal underwater glacier, with intermixed sedimentary layers. Kind of like what we have with methane hydrate deposits, only much, much deeper. The super-deep ocean simply wouldn't exist, and we might not even know about the Mariana Trench, or a lot of other sea floor features. Also, it's possible a different proportion of the world's water would be frozen in this way.

With ice as a part of the sea floor, it would also interact with subduction zones at continental edges. That might push a LOT more superheated water into volcanoes, faults, and everywhere else water could go. That would probably make for a lot more geysers in such areas, and volcanic eruptions would be far more energetic.

The trajectory of human history and technology would also be changed. There might have been fewer ice bridges between continents during the last ice age. Ice-skating wouldn't become as common a thing until we get refrigeration. Harvesting ice in the winter would require bodies of water to freeze solid first, making it impractical except in shallow areas.

I'm also going to wager that glaciers would behave differently too. I don't know enough about their dynamics, but I wonder if having meltwater on the bottom helps lubricate their movements somewhat. Kind of like a lava flow, only slower. Inverting that relationship might make glaciers far less mobile.
- Yeah, not good. It's kind of a weird quirk of nature that water is pretty unique in that it gets less dense when it's a solid as well.
- Hmm, might small bodies of water, say pusdle to pond size, still freeze from the top down because of exposure to colder air and above freezing earth? If the top freezes over all at once it might stay on top unless something breaks it and allows water to flow from under to over
The movie Titanic would be boring