Fighting For Survival With Science

LITTLE KNOWLEDGE OF SCIENCE is necessary to understand that a large sheet of aluminum or other reflective material, covering thousands of square feet, could be placed in Earth orbit, geo-stationary or otherwise, could collect a great amount of solar energy, and could reflect it to the Earth's surface in the form of microwave radiation, where the collected heat energy could be used to boil water to operate steam turbines the energy from which could be used to operate the machinery necessary to desalinate a tremendous amount of sea water, which could then be piped into arid regions of the Earth, areas suffering from prolonged drought. Huge parts of the Sahara desert, for instance, could be "terraformed" into environments suitable for productive agriculture. The American west comes to mind. A large part of the land area of the planet consists of historically and presently unusable desert. There are rivers in Colorado which at this time of year should be gushing with billions of tons of fresh water, fast and deep. Beginning about a hundred and thirty years ago, with the westward expansion of the United States bringing people to the west by the thousands, dams began being built, and rivers tapped of their water, all up and down their winding courses, used for agriculture and drinking water. Then, about twenty years ago, with the population of the western United States exploding more rapidly than ever, teh drought to end all droughts began, and continues unabated. By the time it reaches the ocean, the once proud and mighty Colorado River has been reduced to a mere trickle of its former self. And so it goes in the American west, where we the American people, never lacking for ridiculous, even delusional thinking, expect to maintain and supply huge, ever growing metropolitan areas, while simultaneously growing fruits and vegetables out of season, all for the hedonistic, highly questionable purpose of supplying Americans all across the fruited plain and in Eastern cities with fresh fruit and vrgetables year round, since it is evidently not acceptable, beyond our willingness to expend the effort necessary to put food in cans and jars, and preserve it for the winter, reaching into the pantry as needed to get side dishes out of storage as our hearty, intrepid ancestors once did, not so long ago. We are resolved, obviously, to make life as easy and convenient for ourselves as humanly possible, even if it means destroyng our own environment, which, quite obviously, it does. A further advantage of massive desalination of sea water and moving it from ocean to arid land is that, equally obviously, so doing would at least to some extent extenuate the ongoing process of sea level rise, which is already endangering all coastal areas, and will only continue to do so with ever increasing severity, if something isn't done about it, pronto. Although its hard to imagine our being able to desalinate and remove enough water from the Earth's oceans to make even a dent in sea level rise, there is no law of nature or humanity which precludes such an outcome. That, if nothing else, gives us some measure of hope, in the form of possibilities. Planing trillions of trees, on the other hand, is a less optimistic solution to climate change and carbon removal from the atmosphere; it turns out that even if every square foot of the Earth's surface hosted a tree, there would still be more carbon in need of sequestering to stave off climate change. But why not get started? Why not get started desalinating massive amounts of ocean water, and planting a trillion trees? It wouldn't hurt, and it might even help, somewhat.