3 ms·

That’s a looooooot of salt, way more than you’re ever gonna use up through food, and it’s heavy. And corrosive.

• 41b696ef1113 4y ago
  1,000,000 humans require 4,000,000 liters of water daily. Seawater is 3.5% salt (35g/l), giving us 140,000,000g of salt. If we assume NaCl, with a density of 2.17g/cm3, that gives us 64,500,000 cm3 of salt, or 64.5 m3. I am getting a range of capacities on dump trucks, but somewhere on the order of 10m3 per truck. So 6-7 dump trucks dropping salt into the middle of nowhere. That does not sound like an infeasible problem for maintaining 1e6 humans? Expecting Cunningham’s Law to show I goofed the math.
  • sidewndr46 4y ago
    My understanding is some US salt flats are actually restored on annual basis to facilitate high speed racing on them. So if you didn't mind trucking it a very long distance, they'd be happy to have you dump it out there.
  • oceanplexian 4y ago
    Humans require a lot more than 4L daily if you count sanitation, food production, and so on. But it’s still true that ultimately it’s not a lot of water if we wanted to put our minds to it.
  • VBprogrammer 4y ago
    I think your main issue is that the NaCl doesn't come out in a pure crystalline form. It's a higher concentrated brine but still contains an awful lot of water.
    • 41b696ef1113 4y ago
      Nuts, that is an excellent point. I am failing to find the outflow concentration of salt, but you are correct that the output is likely to be only mildly concentrated (eg 7% salt). For all I know, it take an order of magnitude more energy to emit pure salt rather than a brine. Total amount of salt is not insurmountable, but the volume of output would be challenging quickly without enormous evaporation pools.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    You have 4 liters of water per person? That's what, only drinking? Average household water use in 100-200 liters per day.