It's always bothered me that the sci-fi name for Earth is "Terra".
Terra comes from the Latin word terra, meaning land, soil, or dirt.
The implication is that, from a cosmic perspective, Earth is remarkable mainly for its dirt.
I disagree.
We found another life-harboring planet!
Oh, cool! Which star system?
Sol.
Isn't that the star with the polar hexagon planet?
Saturn, yeah.
So, what kind of life did you find this time? More crabs?
Nope! Well, yes, there are crabs.
But there's also a bunch of other lifeforms!
That's unusual. What non-crab lifeforms are there?
Yep. The primary lifeforms are bipeds. From what we've seen so far, they really like concrete and cats.
What are cats?
They're another new lifeform.
They seem to like fish
and what are fish?
Another lifeform. They have little tails they use to swim.
wait what
did you say swim? In what?
Liquid dihydrogen monoxide.
(water)
Water? What a specific niche!
Not really. 71% of the planet's surface is water, actually.
It's why the planet looks so blue.
also it's like 10 kilometers deep in some parts.
How did all that water get there?
Fusion from hydrogen in the protoplanetary disk, mostly.
also some probably came from asteroid bombardment.
How does the water stay liquid, then? Wouldn't it just get vaporized by the sun?
It does.
The water vapor is lighter than the ambient atmosphere, so it floats upwards and collects into megastructures that we're calling 'clouds.' They hover a few kilometers above the planet surface.
No, seriously.
I am being serious.
It's the white stuff in this picture. 
What!?
Yeah, we found it hard to believe too.
So that's collected over billions of years, right?
Nope.
All of the vapor in those clouds was liquid about 10 days ago at the latest.
How is there any water left on the surface?
If too much water turned into clouds, the clouds would eventually block out the sun and stop more water from being vaporized.
What prevents that from happening?
The vapor at the bottom of the clouds doesn't get enough sunlight to keep it vaporous, so it condenses back into water.
What happens then?
It falls from the sky
the water, I mean.
What.
It just falls?
yeah
you mean like acid rain?
yeah, except rather than acid it's water
weird
rain isn't even the weird part about clouds
The friction from the megatons of water vapor rubbing against itself builds up a static charge
once the static buildup gets large enough, it conducts through the air
and heats up the air around into a plasma conduit that can be five times hotter than the surface of a star
WHAT
the thermal expansion of the air causes a shockwave and sonic pulse audible from about 16 kilometers away
blimey
how the heck is this planet habitable?
if at any time a given location could be struck with a beam of energy outshining the sun?
no idea
so how much power is in these plasma conduits?
Not enough to be useful.
the bipeds extract energy from the rain by building big concrete walls with electric dynamos at the top
so that when rain falls somewhere higher than the wall, it creates a big reservoir
and when the reservoir height reaches the wall the water spills through and turns the dynamos
So they're indirectly using the entire ocean as a solar panel
Yeah, you could put it that way.
Oh, and they also make their own clouds for electricity by heating up water with uranium.
That must require huge amounts of water
Not actually that much, surprisingly.
The bipeds' biggest use for water is for sustaining lifeforms.
?
Yes, all lifeforms on this planet need water to stay alive. Most of them perish in a few days if they don't ingest water regularly.
Are you joking? I honestly can't tell anymore.
I'm not.
The bipeds are like 60% water by mass.
What do you mean? Are they literally made of water!?
Yeah.
This is too bizarre. Have you thought of a name for the planet yet?
Might I suggest Thalassa because of all the water?
Nah, we're going with Terra. Turns out there's some dirt on the land in between the water, too.
Conclusion
First of all, yes, these aliens use the Metric system. I figured that using my absolute measurement system would be detrimental to readability.
In case it wasn't obvious, this was heavily inspired by They're Made Out of Meat by Terry Bisson and Strange Planet by Nathan W Pyle.
This post was mainly an experiment with using media other than plain text and images (stylized text messages, in this case). It was certainly an interesting writing experience. I'm not at all used to writing in SMS-speak, so I had to go back and add in punctuation errors (minor ones; there's a limit to how much I can willfully misuse grammar) and split paragraphs across multiple messages.
Stay hydrated.
~Ethan