Water Water Everywhere

Water. Have you noticed how everyone is saying we’re running out? At the exact same time all the ice is supposed to be melting. Georgia is in the middle of a severe drought, Atlanta is worried about running out of drinking water. That’s scary. We live in Las Vegas, which is perpetually in a drought because, well, you know, it’s a desert.
Personally, I don’t think we’re running out of water, but let’s examine the situation just in case. We live on a planet that is, on the surface, 7/8ths water. Some water vapor is lost escaping the planets gravity, but not much. More importantly, scientists now believe that the building blocks for water are constantly being replenished by capturing cometary fragments and dust as it collides with our atmosphere. But for all practical purposes, ours is a closed system; we maintain the same amount of planetary water over geological time periods. Back in the 70’s Buckminster Fuller coined the phrase “Space Ship Earth” in order to help us understand the idea of a closed system, like a terrarium, or the space shuttle. He wrote a book called Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, explaining his concept about natural resources and how to husband them. But he took the opposite view of the then neophyte environmental movement, which was bent on taking humanity back to the stone age, or eliminating humanity altogether in order to safeguard nature. His view, as I’ve mentioned before, was to do what we do best. Produce more of everything while using less of everything.
Some places seem to have more water than they want while others don’t have enough. Here in Vegas our favorite past time is yelling at the city planners for not planning anything while they let the developers build whatever they want, regardless (in some minds) of whether or not we can support the ever-increasing number of people and demands for scarce resources. We have a million golf courses here. Dancing fountains the size of football fields, a billion hotel rooms, each with its own tub and sink, thousands of luxury suites with tubs capable of holding fast-attack submarines, and more swimming pools than people. Not to mention shark tanks you can walk through, the world’s densest collection of restaurants and a Cirque de Soleil show called O, which is performed entirely in water. But the truth is the resorts conserve huge amounts of water. They use grey water for their golf courses and fountains, they recycle water like crazy—they do a good job with conservation. The problem is there are over a million of us now and dozens of hotel-casinos, all of which use huge chillers for air-conditioning, etc., etc.
We have drought in Sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of China, Washington DC (but that one is not so much a water problem as a shortage of brains and common sense) and dire predictions of things getting worse as rapid climate change continues, assuming it is happening at all and who cares of it does? Other places are being hit with way to much water. Wait till the spring thaw hits and let’s see how much flooding occurs. Has anyone heard any reports about the monsoons disappearing? As far as I know, half of the Amazon basin is still under a few feet of water during the wet season, and Holland is still having to maintain dikes to keep the ocean out.
But—and this is important—we have as much water in and on the planet as we ever have, maybe more. The problem is one of logistics, not shortages. We need to figure out plans for continental water transport systems because that is something we can actually do, if we really want to, as opposed to the idiotic idea that we can effect, alter or control the climate. No one knows how much water is in the deep crust and mantle of the earth, but there is a lot. We have the oceans, which are handy, and very convenient storage reservoirs—except they are a touch salty. So, we might need to invent efficient methods of desalinating large amounts of water. Which means coming up with substantial increases in energy in the form of electricity, which means—for the time being anyway—nuclear power plants. We also have the ice caps which have the advantage of being solid and fresh water. But they are a long way off and cold. Still, we lay cables and pipelines across continents and oceans, I’m sure we could pump ice melt from Greenland and Antarctica wherever it needs to go. Or just wrangle ice bergs into holding pens on coasts around the world and pump the water out as it melts—or as we melt it. And we can transport water in pipelines from the great rivers of the world to other areas. We’d have to be careful with that lest the rivers dry up. Maybe we need to rethink how we farm, who knows? And as we get better at going deep with wells, we should be able to bring up lots of water from the deep. That has dangers of its own—no one is sure what that will do to the stability of the crust and continental plates, but if we have to we can pump our carbon dioxide back down the holes to fill gaps. Or really big batches of epoxy. That should hold things together. There is an aquifer under New Mexico which, I am told, has more water in it than the combined Great Lakes. It’s brackish though, and would have to be purified; desalinated. Which is just a matter of deciding to do it. And remember, the water doesn’t disappear—it just moves around. It’s all always here. Over time aquifers will fill up, rivers will get healthy again, the ice will come back. Never fear. (Geologic time, of course, but whose counting epochs?) The problem, as usual, is mostly political and territorial. Nobody wants to share. Let’s ask Nevada to make a deal with some other states; tell them we’ll store their nuclear waste (because c’mon, get real, it’s gonna happen anyway) if they’ll let us borrow some of their river water. The Snake, Columbia, Salmon. Idaho has so many big rivers, with more water than I knew existed, I’m sure they could spare a few billion gallons. Washington has even more—and lots of radioactive waste sitting around in rapidly decaying barrels. And don’t even get me started about Canada and the Yukon! We could pump it down here during the peak runoff seasons, store it in our massive reservoirs (lake Mead, Lake Havasu, Lake Powell, just to name a few), then cut back a little in the dryer season and rely on the storage.
Eventually we may have to go off-planet to get water. No big deal. Grab some comets from the Kuiper Belt, sling them from some rail-gun type machines, or attach computer-controlled boosters to them, send them into a sunward orbit and then chop them up into little pieces and bring them down on the space elevator (which is in the design phase as we speak.) Piece of cake. We’ll be out there eventually anyway, mining the asteroids for important minerals and metals—may as well grab some water too.
The point is, this is doable. It would take lots of money and time and material, but once the infrastructure was in place it wouldn’t cost much (comparatively speaking) to maintain. I really like the iceberg thing. Stick motors and props on them—controlled by a GPS-rigged computer, and send them on their way. We could probably put modular structures on them and charge top dollar for exotic vacations on a melting hunk of ice. Just imagine, puttering along at three knots, whales swimming by, penguins jumping on and off (in the southern climes), sea birds pooping on your heads. Awesome! Think of the fishing you could get in. And yes, I know bergs shift and roll as the melting changes their shapes and centers of gravity . . . but that’s part of the fun! The modular housing would be designed to compensate, crawling around the berg, trying to find a new stable foundation. And you’d never run out of cold drinks. I hate when that happens, don’t you?