Sure, stick enough new straws in an ancient aquifer that takes decades to centuries to recharge and you'll drain it dry. Nothing noteworthy there. But so what? That just means there's not enough water to go around in your part of the world, it doesn't mean the amount of water in the world has decreased. It's just not going downstream in the river like it used to. The fix there is not to drag water in from outer space and drop it upstream from you and all the other houses. The fix is in recognizing that in your area, there's not enough resources to go around and some sort of restrictions are called for. If the community is unwilling to do that, they may face a choice between spending millions to get water from somewhere within a few hundred miles or spending trillions to get water from a few hundred million miles away. That's the difference between making a deal with some Canadian water authority and building canals or pipes to increase supply, or building and launching hundreds of spacecraft on some decades long mission to drop a bunch of icebergs upriver (that will eventually flow downstream and then you'll need to repeat the cycle again and again).

As far as salt goes - there's about 321 million cubic miles of ocean water in the world. There's about 14 million cubic miles of all other water combined - fresh water, water locked in glaciers and ice sheets, and groundwater. That's a 23:1 ratio of ocean water to all other water combined. At most, there's about 2.2 million cubic miles of non-ice locked freshwater, a 146:1 ratio of ocean water to fresh water. If we desalinated enough ocean water to double the amount of available freshwater, we'd have extracted salt from only 0.68% of the ocean. Drop that back in the ocean - it won't even be noticed (expect the immediate areas where the salt goes back in). And then keep in mind that all this additional freshwater we extracted through desalinization just gets back to the oceans in the normal water cycle, so it very quickly "rebalances" and is unchanged from before the desalinization.

Population growth, aquifer exhaustion, etc. - those are resource allocation issues, not "bring water in from Mars" issues. Drought in one area or another isn't due to not having enough water on the planet, it's due to regional weather (climate), land use, and resource use, planning and conservation. There's plenty of places that deal with too much water for their needs, but it's super expensive to get that water from there to you (but still far cheaper than space harvesting).

There's no amount of space ice-gathering or ocean desalinization that will help your river, well and aquifer issues without transporting that water upstream from you (and then upstream from whoever is upstream from them, etc.). You're not suffering from a lack of water generally, you're suffering from uncontrolled growth overwhelming an ecosystem (specifically an aquifer) that has existed without issues for likely millions and millions of years. It's past the time to stop building houses along that river and dropping wells, at least if the water flow in the river is important.

Whoever trained the AI told it that everything is aliens.

Yes. The first and most recent attempt (of which I'm aware) failed. I think Relativity's Terran 1 will be the next attempt. Of course, the big one - Starship - is also looking to March.

Space and time might have a word, and if not, then gravity will have the ultimate say (the radiation environment is also very likely highly disagreeable).

Well, the catapult is for equipment, mainly satellites. If it works, no telling what they have develop out of it later.

I totally disagree about putting salt back in.

Enough countries start desalination then that much more salt well go into the ocean.
Are you taking into account population growth? Loss of water resources? That some areas are becoming deserts? Loss of aquifers?

I live along a river in Montana that is known for white water and trout fishing. Many houses have been built by the river the last ten years and drop in water levels on the river had been noted.

The major conclusion is houses, like mine have their own well and has dried out the area, so water is flowing from the river to our wells.

As one man said, "How many straws can you put in the glass before the glass is dry?

Developing technology to go get water may not be cheap, easy, or even all that practical but, we may not have a choice.

Cool Rocket ! Is the the race for the first methane engine to orbit still on ?

> ... Bruno said[,] the oxygen pump on one of these engines has consistently produced about 5 percent more oxygen into the engine than expected. This fell outside the bounds of nominal performance but had only been observed in this engine.

> "We've arrived at the conclusion that this is simply likely unit-to-unit variation, ..."

> "Before the end of 2025 we expect to be really at a tempo, which is flying a couple of times a month, every two weeks."

Between the quoted variance and BO's yet-to-be-proved ability to produce motors at the required rate, I remain skeptical they'll be able to reach such a cadence by 2026.

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It wouldn’t have to be negative, they could potentially become allies, help country’s number problems, cure diseases, create sustainable resources. All that jazz.

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Likely not aliens, got to iron out the kinks in the AI algorithm and/or human radio interference. However, machine learning applied to SETI is an exciting development for future searches.

We always go to the worst possible outcome and focus on that... probably for the best.

Imagine it does discover alien signals but then learns their language which inspires their intuition just like psychoactive compounds did to early humans.

I presume that estimation was accounting for that. The fact that signal power exponentially diminishes over distance is really challenging for us.

In the context of these distances Voyager has barely walked out the front door. It's just 0.002 Light Years away. At 100 Light Years away its signal would be 5 million times fainter than it is now, many order of magnitude below the detection threshold of any equipment that exists. No amount of listening with current technology would ever detect that energy level

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good point, well made.

RASER sounds pretty cool too.

You technically can pick out very low signals from the background noise if the signal is repeated continuously, or for at least a long enough time that the receiver gets all the information from the signal.

This is how we are able to receive signals from the voyager probes from so far away. The probes repeat their signal many times because here on Earth we likely won't get the full message the first time. Every time the message gets sent, we decipher more and more of the message.

Wouldn’t this be expected? X mass condensed to a ball makes a y mass star or two objects with y mass.

You can make a laser out of radio waves, there's nothing special about radio waves that prevent you from making a radio frequency laser.

Why don't they issue a galactic arrest warrant

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Or their signals reached Earth millennia before humans existed, or will reach Earth long after we’ve managed to exterminate ourselves. Time and space are unimaginably vast, and our place in both is infinitesimally small.

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