Something that occurred to me is that usually we create hydrogen from … water. You can do it by different methods, electrolysis being a common one. So I’m afraid we might run into a hydrogen problem before we even get very far along.

Water is incredibly common in the universe and easy to make from other oxygen and hydrogen containing compounds. Comets are essentially giant snowballs.

Which leads to a huge gripe of mine with the first episode of Voyager. How could advanced space fairing civilizations have been at odds over not having water???

I’ve been reading the expanse series and I’m a water treatment operator. This has raised my eyebrows a bit. If you’re talking about something like space station or asteroid located bases, the loss would occur through “gas-off” in a way. Gas-off is what we refer to as certain compounds going volatile and dissipating. You might be looking at something along the lines of steam escaping from somewhere. Rocket scientists probably have a different term.

Water should be nearly infinitely recyclable. But clean water? That’s the challenge.

Y’all can look up the Sparta Reuse Facility in West Monroe Louisiana. I used to work for the city, albeit on the other end of the water system producing fresh water. The SRF takes raw sewage, run off, storm water, all the dirty stuff, and processes it into clean water used in local industry. It is “potable”. Tastes like crap, but you can drink it. The point behind the project was to take some of the burden off the Sparta Aquifer here in Louisiana, and it’s done a phenomenal job.

This is true in general. There are a few places around the world that are approaching day zero of water supply. It’s a solvable problem but needs more focus

Thank you for the thorough answer and some how understanding my stray and incomplete thought, I really appreciate you

It does have some dangers to it but if aliens are intelligent enough to travel to other stars to steal water they could probably make it

Can one exist? Maybe... Can we ever visit it? Probably not...

When I was a kid, I thought we'd be drinking and irrigating with desalinated ocean water by now. Maybe no one has figured out the best way to profit from it yet although I understand that Isreal has been using desalinated water for a couple of decades.

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There is a ton of water just under the crust of earth. I think we we would dig for that first.

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We can't run out of water. You can make fresh water from sea water. There is zero chance we run out of water.

Not many places do this now because it's expensive but if we don't have a choice it will be done. It's still far cheaper than doing anything in space.

Yes it is relatively uncomplicated to make water in a lab setting. I suppose it would be a matter of how much energy you could muster to create enough hydrogen to produce enough water to sustain a civilization. Of course once the water is created there are plenty of ways to recycle it.

But more practically, if we were to truly run out of water, we’re all screwed. The air we breath is laden with water vapor. Without it, it would be quite inhospitable. If we ran out of water, animals, plants and crops would desiccate and die faster than we could create water. Bacteria and microscopic life that is the underpinning of our entire planet’s ecosystem would rapidly dry up and perish. There’s no way we could produce enough to rehydrate the entire planet before life totally collapses.

It's not a well known secret, but enough people are surprised to find this out. And yeah, it's just not something that can be "greenwashed"

Yes. This. Got this for my dad for Christmas. Will probably give it a read, as well, at some point.

I don't know how true the Blue Gold documentary is, but they estimate we'll run out of fresh water in about 50 years as population grows and more water is needed.

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I’m not at all surprised that you get all of your knowledge of nuclear power from the Simpsons. That explains why you think that nuclear plants boiling water is some kind of secret that no one knows about (on the Simpsons, the cooling towers emit some kind of noxious smoke).

But no, real nuke plants are not like that. Please don’t talk as if you’ve been to one.

Nah I think they're talking about the Pandora with all the Vault Hunters and bandits.

We can't really run out of water...75% of the Earth's surface is water.

I’m sorry that’s my bad I meant in a purely hypothetical manner, earlier today I read a passage from a friend of mines book and it mentions some alien civilization running out of water, and I couldn’t justify going to war over something so relatively “common” as in the components to make water are

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Why would we run out of water?

I can see having massive shortages of fresh water, but that can be easily fixed with money and power.

Absolute 0 is unreachable, in the sense that it breaks the laws of quantum physics. It violates the uncertainty principle.

I realize that black holes violate a lot of fundamental ideas in physics, but the general attempt is to find rational ways to rectify those violations, not simply accept them. Hawking’s work was based on solving many of those discrepancies.