Without surface tension, water would evaporate much faster in general. Probably could set out a cup of water in the morning and it would be gone by bedtime.
Your own body would basically be a fog cloud of evaporation all day until you were dehydrated like a skeleton in a salt flat, which is exactly what you would be, since no life anywhere could exist.
If there were no surface tension there would almost definitely be no wicking action either. If it didn't evaporate super quickly, water without surface tension would probably be a giant pain in the ass to clean up.
Doesn't alcohol (like isopropol) have like zero surface tension? I know it evaporates super fast which is one of the factors that makes it a good cleaning agent.
Yeah if you're using high percentage isopropanol it's less effective. I think the current recommendation is 70% for sterilization purposes as it remains in contact longer. Higher percentages is more for its use as a solvent or cleaning electronics.
This is almost completely unrelated, but your comment made me think of it for some reason, so story time:
Years ago, I worked at a gas station on the night shift. We had these huge wall mounted containers of cleaning supplies, like soap dispensers in a rest room, but like 30 gallons/100 liters, and full of various cleaning supplies that a company came by every so often and swapped the empties for full ones. There were like 5 of em, for use in cleaning different stuff.
One day, they came and swapped em out, and no one noticed that they'd all been replaced with rubbing alcohol until it was already after end of day for the delivery company. It took weeks before we could get them to come back out, and for several weeks I had to mop the floors and clean the whole store with diluted alcohol. It was sparkling clean, but good GOD the head rush. I had to leave the doors open and blast the AC whenever we were cleaning.
The rate at which something evaporates is determined by their atoms bond strength, weight has less importance. The reason petrol evaporates fast (and melts and boils at low temperatures) is because they only have London forces, which is the weakest weak bond.
If you want to test it you could just seal your room, tape the windows and doors and keyholes, then let enough petrol evaporate until the air is saturated. Then you can test spilling it on the floor without fear of evaporation!