Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny Electriglide
The short answer is overpopulation is not justified with an intelligent species, and thus the energy demands of desalination without overpopulation would be much, much less.
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Unless you are advocating population reduction (Euthanasia), there is no point in making your point. The population is what it is and is not going to change appreciably by attrition in your lifespan.
With 70% (some say 71%, some 72%) of the planet covered with liquid water, to a depth of seven miles at it's deepest, water is not a limiting factor.
Energy for desalination is provided abundantly free of charge by a very dirty fusion reactor at the closest safe distance you ever want to be near one: 93,000,000 miles.
Hurricane Rita in 2005 gave an example of solar desalination and concentrated solar power.
In the amount of time that it took Rita to transit one whole diameter (15.5 hours) the calculated evaporation energy required to lift the sea water to fall back as rain (8" average) was 9,422,085,000,000 kilowatt-hours.
The CIA fact book reports USA electric consumption at 3.717 trillion kWh (2004).
9,422,085,000,000 kilowatt-hours RITA in 15.5 hours.
3,717,000,000,000 kWh USA consumption in a year.
Hurricane Rita could have supplied the entire USA for 2.5 years from the energy represented as rainfall evaporated from sea surface in the time it took to cross one point.
Since neither energy nor water are factors of significance whatsoever in the survivability of an "intelligent" species, your use of "intelligent species" is wrongly applied to the human species.
Until and unless you can master the most abundant elements on the face of the planet you have not yet earned the right to be called "intelligent".
The fact that you cannot describe the physical steps required to take raw silicon ores and convert it to photovoltaics means that your educational process is stunted and prematurely aborted.
You do not graduate into being a 21st century human until you can make photovoltaics by using common off-the-shelf parts and public domain process.
It is one of the keystone questions in any "intelligence test".