1:59PM
The Water Gap
Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 1:59PM Nice Steve blog that shows--yet again--how the defense sector naturally gins out techologies applicable to America's future SysAdmin/Development-in-a-Box scenarios.POST: Water, Water Everywhere
The Failed State index matches up nicely with states currently suffering or likely to suffer water problems in the future. Naturally, the correlation with the Gap is very high.
Reader Comments (7)
If this thing works well, it could be truly world-transforming technology.
The invention of the Haber process in 1913, to extract nitrogen from air, led to fertilizers that feed most of the world now.
Mining the water in the atmosphere could be equally major.
I especially like Steve's closing paragraph:
Hmmmm.... Aqua Sciences will be hearing from me soon. I want to talk to them about Central America, beginning with Honduras.
Gotta love that notion of virtual circle of progress.
Is there anything here but a knee jerk excitement about a new tech like this with its drying out the atomsphere? OK that nitrogen ferts are feeding us all now. Not OK that we do not check with the soil scientists and ecologists about this. In reflection, the refined N booms the bacteria then burns out the bacterial and fungal foodwebs so bad that the soil cannot be held and blows away. This boom and bust cycle needs to be slowed. 80% of additives, chem or og run right thru the soil into the ground water. Compost them first and the amount needed plummets and the plants take it up better.
There is an understanding that the top soil, indeed the world is a large sponge and that the respiration part of the water cycle is more important than to just mine it. We need to cover our soils with whatever og matter we can find, herd our places with the knowledge of plants the new sciences, whose 'speak' you all try to use so but cannot back up when it comes to our very food, offer us.
Is this too much to ask, that we reflect and correct our ways to generative ways as we go, as well as go off on these expensive tech toots?
Maybe TPMB could check with Dawkins about this at the poptech thing.
Yes, Kim, there's a lot more going on here than simple knee jerk excitement. The beauty of the blog allows open participation to reflect and correct new ideas. In this spirit, let me offer the following thought.
The NewRuleSets.Project workshop series, held atop World Trade Center 1 at the Windows on the World conference facility, was cancelled after 9/11. Thus the Economic Security Exercise "Food and water resources1," tentatively scheduled for Fall 2001, did not happen.
Perhaps the Institute for Advanced Technologies in Global Resilience might be interested to sponsor a conversation, designed around food and water resources?
1 Asian Energy Futures, Decision Event Report 1 of the NewRuleSets.Project, pg. 10 (hardcopy)
Another thing to consider, Ms(Mrs?) McDodge, is that nobody is proposing (on here at least) that these machines be used exclusively the way fertilizers too often have been. If overused, then there probably will be nasty consequences, but if they're treated as one more tool in the toolbox, to only be used when necessary, they may be able to save lives.
I will make a speculation in near complete ignorance: The amount of water in the atmosphere is vast compared to the amount that humans are likely to be able to extract. So, there is probably not much to worry about on that score. Second, unlike the vastly increased use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, we have a pretty good idea of what happens when people drink or otherwise use water. We probably won't have nearly so many nasty surprises. In the meantime I see no reason not to be happy about any technology that might make it possible to get water for the hundreds of millions of people, especially small children, who are sick or dying because they cannot get clean water to drink, or cook or wash in.
OK, then, that yuz guys are moderate and thoughtful. Of course, this would help the water starved children and for that I am happy, happy, happy. Send in SysAdmin and leave some of the machines behind as suggested. Put them in the DiBs. Move them on out! Esp behind catastrophes.
And that does not stop me from knowing that tech fix is expensive and temporary and that more appropriate technos can do more in the long run to establish habits that are time tested and simple, like learning to not muck in and with our clean water and learning about the soil foodwebs and how to tend and feed them, knowing when we have gone too far with our over/under refinements that lead into non-generative 'failed' states of being.
Long term and shaky platforms.
Mr Jarvis, thanks for the references. I have reviewed some people who could be included in conversing about these aspects of global resilience at the below site. Mr Michael, for you moderation. It is Mrs. Mr Green, for your speculation on the limits of extraction.