Engineered Water

Today, the world is facing a shortage of fresh water. In 20 years that shortage is just going to get worse: most fresh water sources have been tapped, and a lot of the developing world will see massive population expansion, leading to the need for more eater for both man and beast, as agriculture is the largest user of fresh water.

The solution most environmentalists want and are looking at is water conservation, especially in areas like the United States. The truth of the matter is that conservation does not mean a damn thing when there is simply not enough water to start with.

The solution is in engineering,  as are many of the solutions to today's environmental challenges. The earth has no shortage of water.... we are the blue planet after all. And the solution is to use the oceans as our source of fresh water.

Israel is putting a few billion behind desalinization over the next decade, but the challenge is that even the most moder reverse osmosis plants are damn expensive. The filters that they use to force the large salt particles to separate from the much smaller h2o tend to become easily clogged with organic matter.

A new solution is to run all of the water the a long series of pre and post filters to improve results and retain more of the expensive reverse osmosis filter. The hope is that the oceans water becomes a resource available not just to the wealthy states of the middle east, but to the burgeoning populations of Asia and Africa.

My main question, and one I am not sure of the answer to myself iz where the ability to provide all of this fresh water is ultimately a good thing: it will allow population expansion to keep going at it s current staggering rate, and possibly accelerate. But is that a good thing?  Or should there be some limitation to the number of people on this blue rock?

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