Sorry, I misread that.
GreyEyedGhost
joined 2 years ago
If they were doing this monthly, that assumes they were selling thousands of cars each month. That seems unlikely.
When is the last time you heard complaints from the Clovis people?
If by strawman, you mean fundamental laws of physics, then yes, you're correct. If we find ways to break basic laws of thermodynamics, then I won't be worrying about ways to sterilize water, I'll be worrying about how to make faster-than-light starship.
The part you're studiously ignoring is plenty of people saying yes, you could do this, but that it's wildly inefficient. You could also power a bike by getting the biggest rock you could throw, tying a rope to it, applying the brakes on your bike, throwing the rock, releasing the brakes, and then pulling on the rope until you've collected your rock, and repeating until you've reached your destination. This will always work. But as long as your bike is in earthlike conditions, there will always be easier ways to do it. This is also the case for your idea.
Distillation doesn't have to be of water. Not all impurities are solid. And the evaporated water does go back into the water pool, just with steps we aren't directly involved in.
This is simple math. We would need to increase our energy production by 1000 times to just treat water, maybe only 250 times if we used more efficient systems than simply heating it and letting the heat dissipate. If we doubled our energy production every year, it would still take a decade to do it (8 years if we were aiming at 250 times). That isn't a realistic amount for a civilization at our tech level.
While you aren't wrong overall, heat exchangers and heat pumps could drastically reduce the energy requirements, perhaps getting the energy requirements down to 4 or even 2 times the national capacity. This doesn't means that it's impossible, it just changes how impossible. It also doesn't change that there would be cheaper ways than just heating all the water, or that those ways would also be cheaper with more efficient heat management systems.
Not that I advocate it, but another way of writing what you just said is, "This whole treaty thing wouldn't be a problem if we had just gone with full genocide."
If I, my software, or my data last this long, I will have nearly 8000 years to resolve it. Which is to say, the year 9998 is going to get busy.
If I was looking for a more awkward bathroom experience than using a trough, this would be on the list.