If there’s one thing in this world that is both tasteless and necessary, it would be water. Actually, scratch that, air would be equally important but that’s not my point. I’m focusing on water. The human population of the third planet in a solar system that is on the outer reaches of the milky way galaxy (as it is known by by the indigenous inhabitants of the planet) has grown to over 7 billion people last year. All 7 billion people needs to drink water to survive [citation needed]. I am going to split this research into a few parts due to the large amount of research papers, websites, and information in general that I have to go through.Now that’s out of the way, it’s time to ask the important question.
How much water do we have?
From studied so far, the volume of the world’s oceans is 1.332 billion cubic kilometers [1]. That’s a lot of water [citation needed]. I don’t think I need to exaggerate exactly how much that is. But I will. That amount of liquid is roughly half the water based lubricant you go through in one night when… well you get the idea. I don’t think a racist homophobic necrophilia incest joke is acceptable anywhere other than 4chan (and if you don’t know what 4chan is, go check it out. It’s a nice place [citation needed]).
In terms of freshwater (all in cubic kilometers), we have 24 million in ice caps, glaciers, and permafrost, 23 million in groundwater, and around 10.5 million in fresh water that is available to drink as is (if you don’t mind the occasional deadly bacteria or virus). 3.8 trillion cubic meters of water is withdrawn every year (excluding evaporation), which when converted into a similar metric as what we were using before would yield… 3800 cubic kilometers of freshwater. Oh well, that’s a lot less than I thought. You know what, we’re in the clear! But wait, that’s just the withdrawn from the reserves. A research done shows that the average American uses around 420 litres of water per day. So some simple maths yields around 50 trillion litres of water in a year. Which once again… isn’t that much. If it weren’t for the fact that only 1 percent of our freshwater is readily accessible due to stupid things like, being trapped in other less convenient forms, such as ice. 1% of 23 + 10.5 + 24, gives us around 570 thousand cubic kilometers. Suddenly, 3800 out of 570,000 seems like a lot (~0.66%). It would mean that if there wasn’t any replenishment via the water cycle, we would run out of water in 150 years.
When nature kicks you in the balls, it usually doesn’t end with just one kick. So of course things are going to get worse from here. Fresh water isn’t spread evenly in the world. Some areas are affected by droughts (South Africa is brought up a lot when we talk droughts) while others are constantly flooded (Atlantis is a good example). So we’re stuck with technically enough water for the world population right now, but just with really, really bad distribution. So we need to move water around. Except that it is a lot harder than it seems. Moving water by trucks is extremely inefficient. Moving it by any form of transport that we have is extremely inefficient. So we need to build some canals that funnels water into areas that needs water.
But geography puts the ‘anal’ in ‘canal’.
Water tends to flow in a downward direction [citation needed]. Unfortunately, mountains tends to go upwards. It’s kind of axiomatic that way so there’s not much that we can do about it. Water doesn’t seem to like it when you tell them to go upwards. This is actually good, otherwise there’d be no land. Distance is also a major factor. There is nothing that distance can’t break down. From relationships to water, distance tends to ruin things and is up there right after ‘time’. However, we all know that distance and time is related so in reality, that whole family is bullshit. I’ll end this here for now. There will be more coming soon, though a temporary lack of internet might delay it a bit.
Uninformed Trader 