You mean before you get ripped into trillions of atoms?

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Much easier! No one is fighting for the water, and it doesn't have to be lifted up from a planet. Why fight a war for the privilege of lifting all that mass out of a gravity well when you can hoover it up and fly away?

Also, when I said the nebula were more massive than the entire solar system, I couldn't remember if it was hundreds of times more, or thousands, or millions. I just remembered it being astronomically more than the amount of water on earth.

We’re going to run out of clean water a lot sooner than 1000 years lmao

All this talk of the limits of physics make me feel like we’re in a video game trying to explain the invisible edge of the map

Right, now that I take the time to think about it, a “swallowing” wouldn’t look exciting at all, even observed from within the galaxy. The doomed star’s light would just red-shift as it approached until the wavelength was unobservable.

Exactly. Basically as countries develop and get more educated people tend to have less babies. According to Wikipedia 48% of countries already have under a replacement birth rate including all of the European Union. Empty Planet by Darrell Bricker discusses the phenomenon.

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There’s a pretty natural curve as societies become educated and more industrialized, you see infant mortality plummet and overall birth rate drop (there’s a collection of different causal reasons for the drop in birth rate). Negative percentages for a while, then (we assume) stable within a margin of error year over year.

What this means is that we should see various societies level off or decline a little before stabilizing. The only area that really looks at the flattening of population growth as a desperate problem is modern capitalist economies, where you need an ever increasing supply of cheap labor to continue pushing the holy line upwards. A differently structured economy would likely not care much about a stable or stably decreasing world population.

I concur. I used to erroneously believe that we could just carry snow from the poles for water when I was very little. like firing trash into space on a rocket. or placing some sunshine in a package and shipping it to an area that is freezing, or the opposite. People are excellent problem solvers. The challenging part is finishing them. or, on occasion, starting by persuading others to listen.

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Correct. Much less expensive than electrolysis.

What about lasers?

Can’t we just get light ass water instead?

This kinda demonstrates part of the issue with plans to colonize Mars or other planets. People look at mars with no ionosphere an atmosphere so thin it's basically a vacuum for all biological purposes and say "yeah, but it has land".

Yeah there's plenty of everything in space, but we're not running out of anything on earth, we're just polluting it. And it'll almost always be easier and cheaper to clean and use contaminated seawater for literally anything than it will be to drag heavy ass water from the outer planets or asteroid belt all the way back to earth.

Pandora is not actually so small that its core would necessarily be solid. Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, is known to have its own magnetic field brought about by a partially molten core, and it's only 2.5% the mass of Earth! By contrast, Pandora is said to be 72% the mass of Earth, which makes it significantly more massive than Mars and slightly less massive than Venus. What really determines whether or not a celestial body's core stays molten on its own probably boils down to a favorable amount of transuranic elements in addition to size. After all, half of Earth's own interior energy can be attributed to the decay of radioisotopes and the occasional natural fission reactor. The presence of tectonic activity might also be important, which could explain some differences between Earth and Venus in regards to their interior activity.

It can also take a very long time for stellar winds to strip away another celestial body's atmosphere, and there are means to replenish any losses like volcanic outgassing.

Just as a counterpoint, we will not have any water sometime after 100 million years to 1 billion years. (I've seen a lot of different estimates, which seem to keep getting revised to shorter and shorter times.) Of course we'll have a bigger problem long before that as at that point the surface will be hot enough to boil the water away, which is way beyond what we can survive.

Likely we would end up with entire lakes of "dead" water that would be a future problem.

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The current cheapest way to make hydrogen is I believe from steam reforming methane.

When you say you have a firm handle, have you done any math???

Agreed. It would be about like Antarctica. But with stronger tidal forces, or (most likely) on a more recently formed moon, it would be possible. Uncommon, but much more likely than a gas giant in the habitable zone.

Eyup. You could probably drink the resulting mix but increasing your supply of drinkable water by 1% isn't much of a solution. Literally.

In corny sci-fi terms would this be easier then invading a planet