Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
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7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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I have family that can't drink their tap water because it's practically brackish (is was entirely brackish when someone pierced the aquifer boundary and created a hole that filled the underground reservoir with the nearby sea water, that lasted about 18 months, the entire community was on water that was being trucked in while a new well was discovered and drilled), their water is insanely subsidized, and still pretty expensive. The community is about 200 houses, each with access to Ocean/River inlet water, I don't know a single one of them that wouldn't go for this option. Their water is so heavily mineralized that filters lifetimes are hours to days. And then maybe they can allow the aquifers to refill, and maybe their houses wouldn't be sinking as quickly...
Hey, I'm not saying this technology doesn't have a use, and maybe if it's stupidly expensive it will be heavily subsidized. The point I'm making is that it "likely" isn't the solution to world wide water scarcity.
Another user commented that desalination is a grift, it's not, the market forces just aren't there yet to push its large scale implementation world wide. However, the idea that an upcoming technology may theoretically scale up and be the same economic scale is historically unlikely.
Historically the trajectory of this sort of technology is that it will define technology for the next 20 years (Nobel Peace Prize or more), or it will be bought up and buried by a big corporation (goodwill isn't typically good for capitalism), or it won't scale up as predicted and will be a major nothing burger.