Comment by dakolli

> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already

Let's take Kansas... the largest producer of wheat in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/190376/top-us-states-in-...

Kansas wheat crop down 38% from last year https://youtu.be/QjrhAXzEGDc

Kansas cannot run on desalination plants ... there's no salt water. The gulf coast of Texas is 1000 miles away.

While aquifers do regenerate (Groundwater levels in the Kansas High Plains aquifer see first overall increase since 2019 https://kgs.ku.edu/news/article/groundwater-levels-in-the-ka... ) I'm going to point out that news article has seven years of declines previously.

The aquifer that Kansas draws upon is the Ogallala Aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer ) and you can see the rate of depletion at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation... - there are spots in Kansas where the groundwater dropped by 150 feet from before it was tapped with deep wells to 2015.

Yes, most of the earth is covered by water. Getting that water to Kansas and Nebraska and North Dakota, however, is a problem.

The problem is that aquifers are really cool natural filters, and only refill as fast as groundwater moves through the soil. So they're a finite resource. Instead of depleting them, people who want to farm in deserts should probably start desalinating or whatever themselves instead of assuming subsequent generations will do it.

> Plenty of countries completely rely on desalination already

There are only 3 countries that do: Bahamas, Maldives, and Malta.

Other countries that depend heavily, but not completely: Qatar, Kuwait, UAE.

and desalination is so efficient/cheap at scale already that it barely affects water prices in those countries (less than 10% already, further shrinking every year as methods improve)

Desalination isn't really much of an option for deeper inland and much higher than sea level areas. Tell me, which ocean is Dodge City KS going to pull from?

Plants require a ton of desalinated water and Animals who eat plants as such require desalinated water too.

There are countries in middle east like UAE, Saudi arabia etc. which rely on desalination but they are relying it for the clean drinking water, not for the food generation. They import almost 90% of their food iirc.

The amount of energy required to desalinate all water and the environmental impacts to get that energy would literally be quite catastrophic and I am not even sure if it would be even feasible and food prices would literally skyrocket or food would simply be produced even more less by magnitudes of order.

This is by far the dumbest post in this thread by a mile. It's funny saying AI will make people dumber when you've obviously don't understand this issue in the first place. Food security is human security. When you take a huge percentage of a countries grow able land out because it stops raining then food proces go up, often dramatically.

Desalination uses far more power than AI ever would.

huh?

we live in an open system at any scale except the whole universe and even that is gaining energy

the earth is slowly losing both hydrogen and oxygen, and has tons of energy coming in from the sun

into the scale of a field, or a state or a country or a continent, theres very obvious flows of the water cycle introducing water via rain/snow, and removing it via evaporation, seepage, and rivers.

the only closed system is if you make one of those wine fermenter biospheres, and even there its open to energy coming in via light

the second law will keep applying

The energy required to transport water from the coast to our major agricultural areas would be astronomical, and the resulting brine waste would create its own environmental crisis. If we get to a point where we're forced to bypass natural water cycles entirely, our native ecologies will have already collapsed. At that point, we'll be trying to engineer our way out of a total ecological apocalypse as masses starve in bread lines.