And you have as yet not replied to any of the assertions that "bird" and "dynamite" are equally good answers.
Also, I'm not arguing about human ignorance so much as human ability to make unjustifiable conjectures.
Something which often becomes a problem for students in the sciences is trying to relate simplified concepts to specific real-world examples, with all of their complexities and peculiarities. Another is trying to read too far into a question.
In the first, we often blind ourselves to the...
I guess you were just given a poorly worded question. It asks you to assume that there are no waves and is no flow; in reality, there should always be very small velocities of many small volumes of water.
The thought process you were supposed to have was:
Bird perched in a tree has potential...
It might be helpful to rename molecular kinetic energy "internal energy" or "thermal energy." Then only when some gross volume of water is moving do we say it has kinetic energy. Now we can understand water at the top of a dam, if it is not flowing, to have zero kinetic energy--and quite a lot...