To walk on water requires less faith than you might imagine, but considerably more science.

We striders have three inherent advantages when it comes to fluid mechanics: we’re light, we’re agile, and we have an instinctual grasp of surface tension.

It’s this combination of attributes that made us uniquely suited to the development of advanced fluidic technologies.

When we first ascended far beyond our ponds and lakes, we colonised the sky with semi-organic bubbles filled with lighter-than-air gases. We sent out explorers, riding the bubbles’ intangible boundary as if we’d been born to it.

We crafted floating observation stations to advance our knowledge of the sky. We mixed dense breathable gases into submersible habitats, and dropped them below the thermocline to explore the abyssal plains.

We learned through steam and tragedy that our technologies were insufficient to survive the last great boundary, of the sky and the vacuum beyond. And so we returned to our ponds and our maths and everything we’d learned.

Today we launch a craft, a shell of sea-wrought metal wrapped around a torus of water.

And riding upon that surface, its ebb and flow safeguarding against the crush and pressure of space, we will stride amongst the stars.