ThinksMarkedly wrote:penny wrote:Water in space is not going to be as plentiful as that on the ground. Already filtered and untouched for millennia. Potable water! Enough to bathe and swim in! Enough to water a lawn.
Water in space is more plentiful than on Earth and, by definition, Earth-like planets. If you stray from Earth-like into hycean or pan-thalassan worlds, then you may have more water... but also less solid, dry ground too.
Since I do not wish to reinvent the wheel, I will repost this from quite some time ago from another thread. People oftentimes forget how things work in the real world.
Potable water is the goal!
Again.
Collection from planetary and cometary ice sources would suffer lagging production from the many man hours required in the collection and the further time lost in the often overlooked 'conversion and filtering' process. The same often overlooked process regarding the complaints about municipalities, such as LA, suffering water shortages that are sitting right on the coast!
You are making the same mistake as people that used to complain to me when I was fresh out of college working as an Engineer at a water department...
"Why is there a water shortage when the city is on the ocean?"
Collecting water from water should be laughably easy. Yet there are water shortages in LA all of the time. Even when the source (Ocean) is literally beating against the back door of the plants!
It's the conversion process!Desalination has been around for thousands of years. The Egyptians were doing it essentially the same way we are doing it today, called thermal distillation whereby we evaporate water and recondense it, leaving the salt behind.
Actually, the process mimicks nature, which evaporates water from our oceans surfaces, leaving the salt behind. Rain! The planet's natural process produces, more efficiently - and without the intermediate process of boiling, much more potable water than we ever will. It'd be crazy not to use this - already processed water in favor of time consuming desalination processes. Technology that, although I'm thankful for, is hampered by the important constraints of time per unit consumption rates. Now, before I move on to the next item, consider if it should rain non-stop on our planet. *Bracketing the result of worldwide flooding (unless rainfull accumulation perfectly matches an areas consumption rate) it would be senseless to seek other water sources that require collection, extraction, shipping and conversion. No brainer.
*Unless, of course, your particular city's water table is so low such that it adversely affects yield and cost (cost incurred from expensive pumping wells, electricity to run them, maintenance, etc.)
Consider an oil or natural gas well. Most of them yield nine times as much dirty water per barrel of oil. They are called dirty wells. The filtration process is an added time consuming stage inherent in oil production. As opposed to some distant galaxy's region having produced it in vast pools of clean deposits, virtually foregoing the time consuming conversion/extraction process.
In summary, there is a consistent water shortage in Los Angeles where the water plants are sitting right on the ocean. And LA has a population under 3.5 million. The HV will have more efficient technology I suppose, but it also has... 100 billion people did you say on a colony ship??? What???
Water collected in space has to be processed. Fresh water sources groundside might not have to be processed and filtered. Mother nature has been doing that to fresh water sources for eons. Barring any toxicity from a planet, which I think is the exception and not the rule. Like Grayson.
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The artist formerly known as cthia.
Now I can talk in the third person.