Mrthdrb

Depends upon what you mean by solving the water crisis and how much it costs, but yes

Let's assume that teleportation is truly cheap. The question then becomes is there enough available fresh water to solve the water crisis.

The Amazon river has a discharge of about 4.8 trillion gallons per day. This is 600 gallons per day for every person assuming a population of 8 billion. A person only needs about 80 gallons per day for personal consumption including all consumption and sanitation purposes. So problem solved.

However, if consider total water usage, industrial and agricultural usage far exceeds residential usage, and 600 gallons per day is not sufficient for all uses. In the US, total water usage is roughly twice 600 gallons/day.

Assuming that you are simply supplementing the existing water supply, adding the Amazon discharge alone puts you in the ballpark of solving the water crisis, including industrial and agricultural use. The Amazon is not the only potential fresh-water source, so assuming teleportation is truly cheap, you could solve the water supply problem for the whole world.

River discharge would still have to be treated to be safe for use. It is possible that even this treatment results in water that is still too expensive for some areas. So, you still need additional funding supporting water use in some areas. It seems likely that charitable sources would supply the deficit considering the large benefit that would occur.

There would also be necessary infra-structure improvements to support dispose of gray-water etc. Again, this can be assumed to be covered by charity or income-transfer from wealthy nations.

To respond to desalination is cheap, what's the issue.

Well, cheap is relative. Wikipedia lists the cost of desalination at USD 0.38/person/day (based on 100 gal water per day)

This is USD 138.7/person/year -- Not too much for a rich country. But there are dozens of countries where annual per capita GDP is less than 1,000. Too much money for them, they are struggling to buy food already.

Desalination would also require lots of energy. Better start building lots of additional power plants (energy is already included in the cost)

This misses the problem.

The problem is not a shortage of fresh water. The problem is a shortage of purification and delivery. Because you don't normally drink water straight from a well or river. You put it into a water treatment plant and then pump it to residences. A teleporter would help with distribution, but you still have the purification issue.

You've only solved half the problem. And it seems like the easier half. Otherwise there would be lots of communities using existing distribution methods (people carrying jars of water) with better water sources. E.g. a purification plant that distributes water via wagon to large barrels. People get their water from the barrels. People could use communal showers at the purification plant.

Assume that the cost of using such a technology in no way prohibits the use of the technology (e.g., humanitarian organizations could easily raise funds to offset its use for those areas where the local economy cannot support the cost).

It's important to understand what you are saying. This point claims that teleportation is cheaper than distribution via pipes, perhaps a lot cheaper. Cheap enough to put at least three per household: one for drinking; one for bathing; one for flushing (the toilet). Oh, and a fourth for disposing of the toilet contents after flushing. Although...where?

Why not just use one? Because apparently the cost of running pipes is too much (otherwise there'd be no crisis solvable by better distribution). So you have to put a teleporter anywhere you want water to be. And remember that they have no sewage pipes either. Eliminating sewage is at least as big a problem as getting fresh water. And moving it is only a small part of the problem. Cleaning it and rendering it harmless is at least as important if not more so.

In general, when they talk about a water crisis, what they mean is that toilet runoff is entering the water supply. This isn't a shortage issue. There's plenty of water. It's a purification and sanitation issue. Not only the drinking water, but the irrigation water and mud puddle water is potentially contaminated. You fix this with better sanitation more than better distribution.

Figure out a fix for defecation and urination. Then we can start talking about fixing distribution.

Is there enough fresh water in the world to eradicate the drinking water crisis? Yes, quite obviously

The worldwide total annual extraction of freshwater is somewhere around 4,000 cubic kilometers, of which some 3,000 cubic kilometers get to be used and the rest are wasted. The Amazon, all by itself, discharges annually about 6,500 cubic kilometers of freshwater into the salty Atlantic. One single great river carries into the ocean more freshwater than the entire humanity extracts worldwide.

Yes, it will and it will do so much more. If we could simply teleport water from any point to another, there would be no shortage of water. You don't even need to cannibalise the water reserves of water rich countries or the poles, teleport water in from the outer solar system, where it is super abundant. (The moons of Jupiter and Saturn and the planest Uranus and Neptune consist in as large part of water)

Another obvious scarcity it will solve is energy scarcity. Just teleport matter from the lower levels of the sun into a watertank and you have a nearly infinite energy source. (and a nearly infinite source of free weapons of mass destruction)

Even if you teleportation is limited to Earth you can obviously transport fresh water and ice. But you could also teleport hot magma up from the center of the Earth to desalinate sea water via cooking.

EDIT: Some people have brought up the economics of teleporting water. Unless the cost is astronomically high it is irrelevant. Other materials then water (you mentioned any simple form of matter) can be teleported. Just tap the sun or Earths core for energy. Any economic considerations are gone at that point. You got access to nearly infinite free energy.

Maybe, depending on how much it costs

It is currently possible to transport water pretty much anywhere on the planet. The trouble comes when you factor in if it is economically feasible to transport the required amount of water to the places it needs to be.

What you need to work out is whether the teleportation of water will make it cheaper to transport water to the places that need it. Presumably teleportation takes power. If it takes a lot of energy, it might be less economically feasible than just building pipelines or driving water tankers (although it might still save on logistics). If it takes a lot less energy then it would certainly help the water crisis.

I expect it would have to be cheap enough for charities to fund it in order to cure the water crisis, as a significant amount of water shortages occur in places with slim-to-nil economic gain so you won't necessarily be able to rely on commercial forces to solve it (at least without significant political pressure).

Same goes for the food crisis by the way.

• A "crisis" is simply the result of ignoring a problem long enough.




• Crises cannot be "resolved" by treating their symptoms.




• Treating the symptoms of a problem rather than attacking its causes makes the problem worse in the long term.

If a land doesn't have sufficient drinking water, that is almost always the result of a large increase in the use or abuse of the resource. A large increase in population or a large increase in what people do with water will create a water shortage. A large increase in sewage or industrial pollution will create a water shortage.

Transporting water, even if by teleportation, would be only a band-aid solution, treating the symptoms but not the underlying causes of the problem.

With the addition of low-cost water, people will not only continue to consume and pollute, they will do it at an even greater rate. You haven't resolved the crisis, you've delayed it and ensured that it will be even more difficult to resolve.

Forget the water. Teleport the moogie!

There's plenty of fresh water. The issue is water that's been contaminated by raw sewage from the next village upstream.

Since you've got this teleport capability, simply build primordial sewer systems in every settlement that collect the moogie into a focus chamber.

Teleport the moogie to a very large and modern sewage treatment plant, probably in a reclaimed former desert now agricultural area. Turn the moogie into fertilizer, and the discharge water into field irrigation. Manage runoff so there isn't any (except during the rainy season perhaps). Processed water enters the aquifer and is therein cleansed.

Yes I also think, like @Ynneadwraith says, it depends on how much it would cost and how efficient this would be, but in general I don't think it would (assuming the laws of thermodynamics still apply and you'd need a huge amount of energy to teleport matter. I'd also imagine that such teleportation facilities would rather be very expensive to build and maintain).

It is already possible to turn sea water into drinkable water. This would be even better in my opinion since we don't need to split the already drinkable water but could access the other 97.5% of water we have on earth. Also teleportation of water/ice would probably have a huge impact on the ecosystem it is taken from.
Besides some environmental issues the main reason why reverse osmosis hasn't solved the water problems already is money.

So is cost the reason why desalination isn’t used?
Yup. The energy requirements are so high that the cost for a lot of countries is too much.

Yes. The Antarctic ice sheet contains enough fossilized fresh water to provide each of 6,000,000,000 people with 100 gallons per day of water for tens of thousands of years.

There is no "drinking water crisis". There are problems of overpopulation, both local and global. Drinking water is purely a local problem, caused when too many people insist on trying to live in locations such as Southern California, where there is not enough water to support their numbers. If a large number of them just moved to say the Pacific Northwest Coast, their water problems would be solved.

There are also problems of pollution & treatment (e.g. Flint, Michigan) which could be fixed by spending money on adequate water distribution systems.