It is startling to me how much we disregard water scarcity. It seems like there's a persistent attitude that because we haven't run out of water to a dangerous degree before, it will never happen, even as the numbers suggest we are marching directly into a significant drought event.
I worry that the gears of capitalism will refuse to stop turning even as we face significant mortality as a result of dehydration, because our biggest and most profitable industries rely on a mindboggling quantity of fresh water.
We're not "water bankrupt", we're massively over human populated!
Every natural resource is under strain. Every animal and plant not serving as a revenue center for some rich prick is be pushed into extinction.
But for some reason we need to grow the idiot herd, because elon needs more...
Maybe if we didn't have 1 person with more wealth than 1/2 of the US population, we wouldn't have a problem paying for old people to age in relative comfort...
Dystopian scenario: there are a heck of a lot of people in the world and they are 60% of water. Someone will realize this and people will turn on each other to extract that water. :)
I see this as an energy problem. We have 'unlimited' water from the Oceans, and distillation technology exists, it's just not economically viable (enough) because of the high energy costs of distillation. Elon's solution to this is solar panels everywhere, since they're so incredibly scalable (imagine an automated solar factory). Hopefully this comes to fruition sooner rather than later.
loong time ago ~2000~ i worked for company making geological software.. most customers were "digging" for oil but quite a few of the customers were digging for water..
and someone then said "future Wars will be fought for water"
There are some partial solutions that are fairly simple in concept, for example those related to farming. Some of the crops grown in regions where water is less than abundant are unnecessarily water-intensive, leading to a possible strategy that can be summarised as "grow something else". In practice this means regulating farming with emphasis on water management, I often feel that many places could use more regulation in this area.
Simple concept does not mean simple execution, once you start regulating things it's easy to get it wrong, but the ideas are there and are not exactly novel.
There are also a variety of co-planting schemes that drastically reduce water use (i.e. things like combining vegetable farming with shade trees), albeit often at the expense of making mechanical harvesting significantly more challenging.
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[ 3184 ms ] story [ 3015 ms ] threadI worry that the gears of capitalism will refuse to stop turning even as we face significant mortality as a result of dehydration, because our biggest and most profitable industries rely on a mindboggling quantity of fresh water.
Every natural resource is under strain. Every animal and plant not serving as a revenue center for some rich prick is be pushed into extinction.
But for some reason we need to grow the idiot herd, because elon needs more...
Maybe if we didn't have 1 person with more wealth than 1/2 of the US population, we wouldn't have a problem paying for old people to age in relative comfort...
and someone then said "future Wars will be fought for water"
In the future we will do away with outdated concepts like reservoirs and water towers and simply use prompts to access all of our natural resources.
Simple concept does not mean simple execution, once you start regulating things it's easy to get it wrong, but the ideas are there and are not exactly novel.