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>>it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and with Necessity also comes scale, and with scale comes less co

>>it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and with Necessity also comes scale, and with scale comes less cost... Desalination has been expensive because it is not necessary, the second it becomes necessary I bet you will see the costs drop.. If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick

excalibur 3y ago
> If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick Make it so.
nathan_compton 3y ago
I think many of us working in software can be overconfident about how easy it is to scale things, probably because of the peculiar progress in the improvement of integrated circuits and the commensurate increased availability of raw compute for not that much more energy. But many processes (including desalinization, as far as I understand it) are energy bound. It is really hard to make exponential progress when a process is bound by how much energy you can muster up to put into it. That is why rockets haven't had an exponential increase in the amount of weight they can get into orbit in the last 100 years. With gravity you must pay the piper. I doubt scaling desalinization is as hard as hurling stuff into space, but it may not be easy to scale either. There are plenty of places on earth which are very dry, adjacent to salt water, and extremely rich and yet no great desalinization technologies have come from them.
- MandieD 3y ago
  I think many of us working in software can be overconfident about how easy it is to scale things, probably because of the peculiar progress in the improvement of integrated circuits and the commensurate increased availability of raw compute for not that much more energy. You may have neatly (and politely) pinned down why we computer folks are so arrogant about how easy problems outside our direct field would be to solve, if only we were the ones “allowed” to solve them.
XorNot 3y ago
> If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick Why? Nestle just passes the cost on to the consumer, because where else are they gonna go?
dghlsakjg 3y ago
There’s the rules of physics to consider. There are more than a few places where desalination is necessary, and we still haven’t come up with a way to make it cheap. The current issue is that there is just no way that we know of to reliably desalinate that isn’t super energy intensive, so it comes down to trading energy for water. That’s why desalination is expensive.
- hnfong 3y ago
  It seems that solar energy has gotten real cheap in recent years, especially in places without clouds and rain (deserts). So maybe that will work out in the end if the economics make water expensive enough to trade energy for water.

excalibur 3y ago

> If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick Make it so.

nathan_compton 3y ago

I think many of us working in software can be overconfident about how easy it is to scale things, probably because of the peculiar progress in the improvement of integrated circuits and the commensurate increased availability of raw compute for not that much more energy. But many processes (including desalinization, as far as I understand it) are energy bound. It is really hard to make exponential progress when a process is bound by how much energy you can muster up to put into it. That is why rockets haven't had an exponential increase in the amount of weight they can get into orbit in the last 100 years. With gravity you must pay the piper. I doubt scaling desalinization is as hard as hurling stuff into space, but it may not be easy to scale either. There are plenty of places on earth which are very dry, adjacent to salt water, and extremely rich and yet no great desalinization technologies have come from them.

MandieD 3y ago
I think many of us working in software can be overconfident about how easy it is to scale things, probably because of the peculiar progress in the improvement of integrated circuits and the commensurate increased availability of raw compute for not that much more energy. You may have neatly (and politely) pinned down why we computer folks are so arrogant about how easy problems outside our direct field would be to solve, if only we were the ones “allowed” to solve them.

XorNot 3y ago

> If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick Why? Nestle just passes the cost on to the consumer, because where else are they gonna go?

dghlsakjg 3y ago

There’s the rules of physics to consider. There are more than a few places where desalination is necessary, and we still haven’t come up with a way to make it cheap. The current issue is that there is just no way that we know of to reliably desalinate that isn’t super energy intensive, so it comes down to trading energy for water. That’s why desalination is expensive.

hnfong 3y ago
It seems that solar energy has gotten real cheap in recent years, especially in places without clouds and rain (deserts). So maybe that will work out in the end if the economics make water expensive enough to trade energy for water.