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Very interesting article ... namely because fresh drinking water is now becoming a valuable resource. I'm sure the time the article has been written, better an

by ssaddi 11y ago

Very interesting article ... namely because fresh drinking water is now becoming a valuable resource. I'm sure the time the article has been written, better and more efficient ways would turn up for churning out fresh water for public consumption.

soft_dev_person 11y ago
I feel a very American point of view in your comment. Hasn't fresh drinking water been a valuable resource in plenty of places in the world for as long as time can remember?
- TimeToTroll 11y ago
  I'm not sure if you've heard of Africa? I don't think there's any water down there.
- nacnud 11y ago
  Not necessarily American; fresh drinking water is becoming scarcer across the world [1] and therefore even more valuable. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727435/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727435/
- TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
  Two years ago I moved from South Australia to Tasmania. South Australia is known as "driest state in the driest inhabited continent in the world"[1]. Here in Tasmania there's water oozing out of the side of the hills, I'm still amazed by it. 1. http://guides.slsa.sa.gov.au/water http://guides.slsa.sa.gov.au/water Someone else has usually put it better, this time I'll draw on user adrusi: ___________ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8995524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8995524 The problem with freshwater is not that the global supply is limited, rather that supplies in some high-population areas are. The Amazon river sends 209,000 cubic meters into the Atlantic every second[1]. That's 18,100,000,000 per day. A single human drinks about two liters (0.02 cubic meters) every day. There are 7 billion humans, so the global requirement is 140,000,000 cubic meters of water. The Amazon alone contains 130 times more than the global requirement for drinking water. This is domestic consumption, which comprises 10% of water usage[2]. That means that 13 times more water flows through the Amazon than all of humanity uses. That's just one river. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River [2]: http://www.lenntech.com/water-food-agriculture.htm http://www.lenntech.com/water-food-agriculture.htm ___________
  - soft_dev_person 11y ago
    Clearly. I was just considering the drought in the west of US lately and the statement "is now becoming". Personally I live in Norway where we wash our garbage and shower in high quality drinking water. I still find it absurd from time to time, considering the lack of fresh water in many places in the world. Edit: Corrected quote
    - Swizec 11y ago
      We've got a similar situation going on in Slovenia. I don't know if we have more fresh water than Norway, or not, but there are towns that get 3meters of rainfall per year. One such town has an area of 25km^2, that's 25,000,000 square meters. Which means that on an average year, 75,000,000 cubic meters of fresh drinkable water fall from the sky. Comparing that to stats in the grandparent post: 14 times as much drinking water falls on a tiny town in a tiny European country, as the whole world needs for drinking. That's crazy.
      - computator 11y ago
        Somewhere in your calculation there's an error. 75,000,000 cubic meters of fresh drinkable water fall from the sky per year divided by ( 0.002 cubic meters of drinking water needed per person per day x 365 days in a year ) = 103,000,000 people quenched per year. Your tiny town gets enough fresh water from the sky for 103 million people -- still impressive.
  - parimm 11y ago
    2 liters = .002 cubic meters The amazon river runs off 1300 times the drinking water of the world into the sea
    - VLM 11y ago
      Sometimes a small scale example helps, my home town of 100K people has a very small semi-navigable river pass through the middle of it, maybe a hundred feet wide and maybe head depth at most, that flows over a hundred cubic meters per second on average per wikipedia or 30K gallons per second. Some back of the envelope engineering estimates imply 30 kilogallons per second, if somehow shoved thru plumbing, equates to around or over two billion low flow toilet flushes per day. There's a lot of thirst on the west side of the Mississippi, not so much on the east. Of course water treatment to drink that river water isn't free, nor sewage treatment to keep it drinkable downstream, but still, that's a lot of water for a river. There are obvious analogies to income inequality. Humanity has more water than it knows what to do with, but simultaneously there are thirsty individuals.
rs999gti 11y ago
> I'm sure the time the article has been written, better and more efficient ways would turn up for churning out fresh water for public consumption. Huh? "This story appears in the September 2015 issue of Popular Mechanics."

by ssaddi 11y ago

soft_dev_person 11y ago

I feel a very American point of view in your comment. Hasn't fresh drinking water been a valuable resource in plenty of places in the world for as long as time can remember?

TimeToTroll 11y ago
I'm not sure if you've heard of Africa? I don't think there's any water down there.
nacnud 11y ago
Not necessarily American; fresh drinking water is becoming scarcer across the world [1] and therefore even more valuable. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727435/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727435/
TheSpiceIsLife 11y ago
Two years ago I moved from South Australia to Tasmania. South Australia is known as "driest state in the driest inhabited continent in the world"[1]. Here in Tasmania there's water oozing out of the side of the hills, I'm still amazed by it. 1. http://guides.slsa.sa.gov.au/water http://guides.slsa.sa.gov.au/water Someone else has usually put it better, this time I'll draw on user adrusi: ___________ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8995524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8995524 The problem with freshwater is not that the global supply is limited, rather that supplies in some high-population areas are. The Amazon river sends 209,000 cubic meters into the Atlantic every second[1]. That's 18,100,000,000 per day. A single human drinks about two liters (0.02 cubic meters) every day. There are 7 billion humans, so the global requirement is 140,000,000 cubic meters of water. The Amazon alone contains 130 times more than the global requirement for drinking water. This is domestic consumption, which comprises 10% of water usage[2]. That means that 13 times more water flows through the Amazon than all of humanity uses. That's just one river. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River [2]: http://www.lenntech.com/water-food-agriculture.htm http://www.lenntech.com/water-food-agriculture.htm ___________
- soft_dev_person 11y ago
  Clearly. I was just considering the drought in the west of US lately and the statement "is now becoming". Personally I live in Norway where we wash our garbage and shower in high quality drinking water. I still find it absurd from time to time, considering the lack of fresh water in many places in the world. Edit: Corrected quote
  - Swizec 11y ago
    We've got a similar situation going on in Slovenia. I don't know if we have more fresh water than Norway, or not, but there are towns that get 3meters of rainfall per year. One such town has an area of 25km^2, that's 25,000,000 square meters. Which means that on an average year, 75,000,000 cubic meters of fresh drinkable water fall from the sky. Comparing that to stats in the grandparent post: 14 times as much drinking water falls on a tiny town in a tiny European country, as the whole world needs for drinking. That's crazy.
    - computator 11y ago
      Somewhere in your calculation there's an error. 75,000,000 cubic meters of fresh drinkable water fall from the sky per year divided by ( 0.002 cubic meters of drinking water needed per person per day x 365 days in a year ) = 103,000,000 people quenched per year. Your tiny town gets enough fresh water from the sky for 103 million people -- still impressive.
- parimm 11y ago
  2 liters = .002 cubic meters The amazon river runs off 1300 times the drinking water of the world into the sea
  - VLM 11y ago
    Sometimes a small scale example helps, my home town of 100K people has a very small semi-navigable river pass through the middle of it, maybe a hundred feet wide and maybe head depth at most, that flows over a hundred cubic meters per second on average per wikipedia or 30K gallons per second. Some back of the envelope engineering estimates imply 30 kilogallons per second, if somehow shoved thru plumbing, equates to around or over two billion low flow toilet flushes per day. There's a lot of thirst on the west side of the Mississippi, not so much on the east. Of course water treatment to drink that river water isn't free, nor sewage treatment to keep it drinkable downstream, but still, that's a lot of water for a river. There are obvious analogies to income inequality. Humanity has more water than it knows what to do with, but simultaneously there are thirsty individuals.

rs999gti 11y ago

> I'm sure the time the article has been written, better and more efficient ways would turn up for churning out fresh water for public consumption. Huh? "This story appears in the September 2015 issue of Popular Mechanics."