Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

zephyer19 OP t1_j9v6ci3 wrote

Reply to comment by demanbmore in Could they move ice from the planets to Earth? by zephyer19

And when all of that runs out, then what?

We are already seeing its effects on places like El Salvador. People leaving there and coming here because they can't raise crops.

I did hear an interesting story on today's NPR's Here and Now and indoor farming.

1

demanbmore t1_j9v7382 wrote

You've hit the nail right on the head in your response. What we need to do is get water to El Salvador. If you don't want people leaving El Salvador, it is much much much much much much much much easier and cheaper to get water from the Atlantic Ocean or the pacific Ocean or even the Indian Ocean or the Arctic Ocean, desalinate it, and pipe it or ship it to El Salvador then it could ever be to get that water from a planet hundreds of millions of miles away. The water on earth isn't disappearing or running out. It just moves around. There's no place for it to go other than somewhere else on the planet. Solutions like urban indoor farming, reduce water consumption locally and have a role in solving this problem. But trying to build some sort of infrastructure to transport trillions and trillions and trillions of gallons of water over months or years long journeys from other planets do not. I'm not understanding where you're coming from. You have a solution in search of a problem, and honestly, it's not much of a solution.

1

zephyer19 OP t1_j9vi6l7 wrote

I hear a lot about desalination. Nobody answers the question about salt really.

What if you don't have the water to ship around?

1

demanbmore t1_j9vj57l wrote

The answer is dump it back in the ocean. I get you don't like that answer, but that's the answer.

And you can pull a practically unlimited amount of water out of the oceans. Any amount humans can conceivably need.

1

zephyer19 OP t1_j9w230y wrote

Can't put in too much salt, can't put in too much plastic, can't put in too many chemicals...

Is the ocean just one big sewer?

Anyway, thanks for answering the question with science.

1

demanbmore t1_j9xyt6a wrote

You're jumping to conclusions and making assertions way beyond what I'm saying. We're not ADDING salt to the oceans, we're just putting back what we took out. That has nothing to do with dumping plastics or other wastes in the ocean. Things would be very different if we mined salt from Mars and dumped that into our oceans - that would be adding things that didn't come from it just a few days or weeks ago. And understand that all the freshwater we removed would make its way back to the oceans too - that's how the water cycle works. That's the beauty of desalinization - we're just borrowing the freshwater from the ocean for a brief period of time again and again and again, which is what the normal process of evaporation, rainfall/snowfall, and runoff does constantly. The reason desalinization isn't practiced more often is because its energy intensive and expensive, but it's far less energy intensive and expensive as building a fleet of interplanetary mining and transfer ships.

1

zephyer19 OP t1_j9ypbew wrote

The Caspian Sea. Once it was the 4th largest body of fresh water in the world.

Now it has been badly shrunken and is very polluted and becoming too salty to support life and it isn't the only lake.

The Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea are vanishing. Of course, that water could not be used for anything but, the winds blow and blows the salt across cities and agricultural lands.

The water does not always make it way back.

That is really bad for agricultural land, killing it off and increasing the problems.

Ocean life is struggling now, reefs are dying, fish stocks depleted. Now you want to increase the amount of salt.

Anyway, I can see if being able to get ice from other planets and finding a way to process it could be helpful in future space stations and exploration.

Even if my opinion is the dumbest thing you have ever read, I thank you for the informed conversation.

1