Comment on Lemmy be like
ronigami@lemmy.world 1 day agoJust because water is cheap doesn’t mean it’s plentiful. We under-price water, as evidenced by the massive profiteering off of public water. These prices are inelastic and don’t respond to supply perfectly.
Also life can absolutely exist in a game of entropy. You’re pulling semantics with the closed system thing. If you want, then make the closed system be the whole solar system. It doesn’t affect my argument.
Using fresh water causes energy to be spent, that’s the whole point. Yes you can recover drinkable water from anything if you spend enough energy to do it, including the ocean, but we can’t do that as a primary means of getting water. Eventually it is a snake eating its own head with the amount of energy spent to obtain more energy.
wischi@programming.dev 1 day ago
Life can’t exist in a high entropy environment. Of cause you can declare the entire solar system a closed system but because of the sun our solar system will be in an extremely low entropy state on average for a couple of billion years. Once the sun “dies” and the temperature averages out in our solar system there will be no life.
And yes it’s (almost) always an energy argument that why the water argument is a bad one. But not everything is an energy argument. Take He and H2 for example if you let that into the air ot will eventually escape our atmosphere because of solar winds and os truly wasted/lost - but that’s not true for water. You can’t really waste water in a sense that we will have less water im the future (unless you split it into hydrogen and oxygen and let the hydrogen escape).
ronigami@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No one said anything about a high entropy environment. Entropy is a tool for thinking about this stuff, and it extends beyond thermodynamics as entropy is an information theory concept too. The more fragmented things become, the harder they are to work with. When you use energy (or water) for an industrial use it makes that water harder to use (especially for a different use case, drinking). This is a directional thing, not about high or low in absolute numbers.