TechStuff Gets Thirsty

Long time listeners know what I'm talking about. You guys who joined fairly recently, let's just say we spared you. But anyway, this listener mail actually came from Valerie, who sent us an email and said, I would like to suggest an episode on city water systems. I think how different countries are creating a fish and water systems, and also the system that's used in Las Vegas could be interesting for a podcast. So many both so little potable water, what is in our future? And we agree this would

be an awesome episode. So we suggested it to other people, but they said we should do it. Yeah weird, Actually, I I guess we we We have talked about this a tiny bit over on forward thinking, which is a thing that I think we've been saying a lot lately on the show. Yeah. Yeah, And the Forward Thinking episodes are in a lot of ways very closely related to tech stuff because we're looking into the future now. Not

all of Forward Thinking's topics are technology topics. Some of them are social or cultural or have our more science oriented than tech oriented. But if you enjoy the show, chances are you to enjoy that show too, especially since two of the three hosts of that show are this show. So just saying well, well, we'll let you do the math on that one. Um. But yeah, So, so we wanted to do this episode on the infrastructure systems that exist today and historically and some of the things that

we are thinking about for that incredible and slightly terrifying future. Right, So, first of all, let's talk about why is it challenging to get clean water? Um? Lots of reasons, Lots lots of reasons. Rain doesn't fall everywhere all the time that people want to live. Um. Rivers don't flow everywhere all the time people want to live. Sometimes river courses can change over time. Yeah, Um, the climate is kind of changing.

That's that's a thing. That's happening. Um. And basically, even though it's really expensive to create an upgrade infrastructure, UM, it's way more expensive to repair damage caused by failed infrastructure and or to just not let people have water. Um. We don't last all that long without that stuff. So when we get a little further into this episode, you're going to realize, like, you know, some of the some of the systems out there are a little little on

the elderly side. Yeah, and really, not not upgrading your infrast structure is like playing chicken with entropy, because systems break down, they do. And if you yeah, yeah, exactly, and some of these systems look like it's, you know, just a true mishmash because you know, as we know, cities grow over time, some of them don't, some of them decrease in size, but in general you see population

growth the change exactly. So and even if they do decrease, that's another thing that you have to you have to adjust for. Yeah, So you get you get all these different types of add ons to existing infrastructure. That means that not everything is the same. You might have, uh, you know, four or five different generations of pipes in one city's infrastructure, and you know, the more complexity you add, the more likely something somewhere along the line is not

going to work the way you had anticipated. In other words, stuff's gonna break and then you gotta fix it. But let's let's take a look back, way back. Yeah, because a lot of the basic principles upon which we have based in our most modern systems on go back to how far Roman times really? Yeah, so the Romans. You may have heard about the Roman aqueducts and you might think, uh, is that a hockey team. No, it's not that hockey team. Yeah, I would too, centurions on on skates would be awesome.

But uh so the aqueducts were a system of channels waterways that would bring water from distant places to Rome because Rome was a city that was growing much too large to be supplied by the local water sources. And mostly the most famous aqueducts are the ones that you see. They look like bridges from a distance. They're elevated. They're built on these these stone columns, but they are not

bridges for road travel. They're actually water bridges. They allow water to flow, and the reason why they're elevated is because in order to make a pathway from the water source the reservoirs that the Romans were using. It sometimes meant that they had to cross things like valleys. Well, it's really easy to go down a valley if you've got water. It's hard to make the water go back

up the other side of the valley, right. It would have to be going pretty fast because the way that gravity works, and most most of the time things want to go downwards and not upward. You would just have created a river in that valley as opposed to making the water go across. So by doing this aqueduct, if you could have a kind of continuous grade so that it was always going a little lower in elevation than the earlier sections, you could induce water to flow. You're

letting gravity do the work for you. So the Roman system had all these aqueducts, and most of them were actually channels that were cut underneath the ground. Uh there there are quite a few aqueducts that you can see that are built up in their amazing feats of engineering. But I think even more amazing to me anyway, as the thought of all these under yeah, these channels that have been cut into the living rock so that water

can flow through it. Um, and so the water would flow all the way toward Rome, and then they would direct it into giant cisterns, which are just enormous containers, right, a big old container that can hold water. And these cisterns would be in the tallest areas around Rome where the water could still flow into, right, and then a network of I believe they were using lead pipes at the time, which was turned out to be problematic. They were a little blind to the problems at the time.

Um when I would direct the water from from those cisterns into into homes and fountains and other buildings, yep, they would they would run these pipes down through the various parts of Rome so that you could get access to clean water easily, so you wouldn't have to trek far like you know, because before this kind of system, the basic way you got water was you walked to the closest source of water, took you and you went to some water yep, whether that was a river or

a lake or a well know, something like that, and then you would bring that back and when you were out you had to go back out again. This was trying to make that much more accessible now. In total, they're about two hundred sixty miles worth of aqueducts around the city of Rome, which is pretty phenomenal. Bad for a few thousand years ago. Yeah, and uh, they know it was a pretty effective system. They let the gravity

do the work for them. They didn't have to build uh lots of pumping stations, although they did have some, but they didn't have to have as many as you would think they'd need because they were latying. Gravity do most of the work for them. Uh. And in fact, that basic idea of letting gravity do a lot of the work for you still applies today. Oh yeah, I've been in buildings in New York where that's basically how

the water pressure works. They've got a water tower on top of the building, and depending on on what level you're on, you get better pressure because of how far it's falling. My favorite is when you use the sinks in this building and occasionally you get the sputtering noise where it sounds like a a giant ball of cobras is just on the other side of the faucet. Um. You must use the specialist think I don't actually get I'd show you, but you can't go into that room.

So let's talk about a couple of other pre industrial civilizations besides the Romans, because you'd think, well, were they the only ones who came up with this idea, And the answer to that is no, No. Other other civilizations knew that gravity worked. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't necessarily know the mechanism of it or what it was, but they knew that, hey, if you drop something, it falls, and that if you if you look at water, it runs downhill,

not uphill. So you know, drawing those conclusions, you figure out that you need to get water to this place where a lot of people live, because it turns out we need water. London was one of these places. London built what is called the Great Conduit, which was another massive channel that uh that brought water in to London, actually to cheapside, two cisterns and cheapside that were then

hooked up to other cisterns around the city. And if you were rich, you could afford to pay to have pipes brought into your home so that you would have running water in your home. If you weren't rich, sometimes you would try and tap into a neighbor's pipes, which could get you arrested or stealing water. Yeah, I imagine that that also must with the system in ways that made nobody happy. Yeah, you know, nothing like having an enormous leak appearing where you did not expect one to um.

But yeah, that this was something that London started working on in the in the thirteenth century. In the mid twelve hundreds, I heard that Constantinople, Constantinople not stand bull. Why they changed it, I can't say, but Constantinople also yeah, they created a man made river, so again kind of like the aqueduct system of Rome, but more of a river than an aqueduct um. And it was allowed to

carry water both above and below ground. They had sections where again it was they had cut channels into the ground and the water would flow through there, and it was carrying water from about two fifty kilometers away from the city. Like the water source for the city was two kilometers away. Now, when you look at this, like when you look at most cities, like you look at the if you look at a map of ancient civilizations, for example, and you look at where the cities are located,

they're usually right around water sources, fresh water sources. Because that was the most effective way of doing it. Yeah, so, uh, you know, it's it's only fairly recently that we've gotten to a point where if you live really far away from fresh water sources, you can build a large city. We've had smaller you know, smaller uh, towns and villages and populations, nomadic tribes, things like that, that we're able

to exist on smaller sources of fresh water. But obviously, if you if you want to have a city of any size, you need access to a lot of water, all right, And this can this can be a very large problem. For for example, Singapore up until very recently had to basically import all of their water from Malaysia. And uh yeah, it's it's ended up springing up a whole industry that I'm going to talk about in another

few minutes here. But um so it's so okay, um in terms of in terms of our modern water infrastructure, if you want to, you want to talk about that a little bit. You're you're tired of the ancient world. I understand, Lauren. I understand you don't want to dwell in the past. I couldn't agree more, mostly because my notes are out. I'm done with all the ancient stuff. I don't have any other cities that can talk about, Lauren.

So I am ready to move into the future with you boldly, yes and forcibly, where no man has gone before. No one. Sorry, sorry forgot about the next generation an old school. A lot lots of people are in the these are modern times. That's not not like no one has ever been here. We're here, that's true. Okay, So let's talk about your your basic modern water system. It's not that different in the sense that most of them tend to still rely heavily on gravity. Note pun intended.

I didn't realize I was making one until I was done. Uh not, not all of them do. Some water systems use uh electric pumps and will just pump the water to maintain the right kind of water pressure for their populations. But more frequently than not, you're gonna see water towers, particularly things like small towns. You'll you'll usually see as you're going around the outskirts, you see that enormous tower and you think, wow, you know, what is the point

of that? Why do you have this big tower just holding water there? And if you're in a city, like you said, Lauren, you might see on the rooftops, different individual water towers. Yeah, so what is going on here, Well,

it's the same principle. You put the water at an elevated location, and by that elevate location, the weight of the water is providing the pressure you need to provide the However, many households that water tower serves or businesses or whatever, um with the right amount of water pressure

so that when you turn on the faucet water comes out. Now. Um, your basic water tower is able to hold somewhere between I don't know, twoe or fifty thousand gallons of water to maybe five hundred thousand or more gallons of water

at it at a time, so big capacity. Can keep in mind that your average swimming pool holds fifteen to twenty thousand gallons of water, so working more water than pretty big, not small, big lots of water and um usually they are attached to some sort of well always are attached to some sort of pumping station which can pump water back up into the tower as well as usually provide direct pressure to the community. So the way

this tends to work is one of two ways. You can either pump all the water up into the water tower until it reaches a certain level and then you just stop. You turn the pump off. That way, you can serve energy. That way, the gravity will pull the water down, and for every foot that that water is elevated, you get point four three pounds per square inch of pressure. Most cities have between fifty and a hundred p s I. So your water tower's height is going to determine what

that water pressure is. So you've got the pump turned off the waters in the tower. When you, Lauren, decide you want to have a tasty drink of water and you turn on the faucet, then that allows the water from that water tower to come down a little bit. It's pushing all the water through the pipes. You get water through your faucet. Everyone's happy, yea, assuming that all the infrastructure is working properly, right, yes, So that is

that is the general assumption if the water comes on. Now, Lauren, let's say that you decide you want a glass of water at the same time as everyone else in town has decided to take showers, flush the toilet, you know, turn the faucet on outside for no reason whatsoeb or water the lawn, wash, the car, et cetera. It's enough so that the water in the water tower has gone down to a level where it is no longer able to supply that pressure. That's where the pump kicks in.

The pump is able to continuously supply more water, so it's reaching the right pressure. It also, when people start to calm down and decide they're not going to waste so much water anymore, or drink it or whatever, it can start to refill that water tower until it reaches the optimum level. Again. Now, there are other systems where the water tower is essentially a reserve unit. So the water pump is taking water from a reservoir. Could be a lake, it could be a river, it could just

be an artificial reservoir. It's taking water from that reservoir and pumping it directly to the homes. And then any time that the demand outstrips the capacity of the water pump, the water tower is activated and supplements it. So either way you have kind of the symbiotic relationship between the pump and the tower. Now with the tower, the nice thing is, because of gravity, you don't have to add extra energy into the system to get the water to

where it needs to go. You don't have to have all these pumping stations along the lines to keep the pressure at the right level. So, you know, we think about that for things like telephone lines. When we talked about the telephone system, how they had to have relay stations so that they could boost the signal throughout. The

same sort of thing with water pressure. Right if eventually, if you're talking about it long enough, uh pathway that pressure starts, you're going to lose motion resistance along the path and you've got yeah, and you've just got too much space to fill. So um, these are ways of getting around that. So and with the gravity working for you,

you have to spend less energy overall. Pumping the water up into the tower is more energy efficient because you're just filling it up to where it needs to be and then you stop, as opposed to consistently pumping water to the entire population. So in general, that's how your basic water tower works. Uh, it's pretty neat stuff. Actually, I mean, I know it's it's a really simple system, but I mean, but that's why it's so elegant. Of course,

that's not how everyone gets their water, bob. Right, When you're further out from cities, you you're gonna either need your own well or um which you are probably going to need to use a pump in order to access. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I mean, granted, you could think about the well pumps there are, you know, the old style pump handle where you're literally pumping, but more frequently we have electronic pumps. Now. Yeah.

Here in the U. S Alone, we've got some sixteen million private wells, and we drill another five hundred thousand every year. Yeah. And uh so if you live outside of the city, um, which I used to. You know, I used to live out pretty far out there, then you may be using here in Atlanta, living like five miles from downtown is considered a little bit outside the city. But I'm sure I live in the city now, I'm

within the city limits. So yeah, no, no, you know, actually outside where you can see the stars and stuff like that, and cols and and bison occasionally, um, which we're totally domesticated. We don't have wild bison in Georgia as far as I know. Anyway, if you live out in the in the sticks, as I would say, which I used to, then you might have your own well, or you might have a communal well of some sort. But the way this works is you end up digging down.

See there's this thing called the water table that exists underground and it's pretty much everywhere more or less. But you have to dig at different depths depending upon where you are right, depending on on how much rainfall a location gets, and um the other runoff that kind of stuff, and you know, lots of things will determine exactly how far down you would need to go, and also the quality of the water. We'll talk about that in a

second too. But if you happen to live someplace that has good aquifers, like freshwater aquifers that are at the you can access at the water table, you can dig a hole and then eventually you know you should hit water. And so for example, a shallow well might be or or less down and with that you could use what's called a jet pump. What is it jet pump too? So jet pump, Well, it does is it pumps water?

But the way it does is kind of cool. You're welcome, Yeah, So yeah, it uses electricity and it uses a little bit of water that you already put into the pump. It's called to prime the primate. It's drive water is what's called. So it's got a little jet, a little think of it like a nozzle that you would put on the end of a hose. And you know, by reducing the size of the pathway that the water can go through, you also increase the pressure. You put a little water in it to primate. You turn it on,

it starts to emit this water at high pressure. It starts to create a vacuum, right due to the jet of water flowing out, it creating suction inside the tube, right, and the tube goes down into the well until it hits where the water is actually goes further down than that obviously, but then the water gets drawn up the tube through that vacuum, yep, and then it gets sent into a holding tank of some sort. So this isn't you know. The wells that are being used are not

something that you know. When you turn on the faucet, the well kicks in and then you have to wait a while and the water comes out. The pump continues to work until the water tank reaches its optimum level and it turns off and then we'll come back on when it when the water is depleted a certain amount, so that you've kind of got your own little personal mini water tower. Yeah. And since since you're not necessarily using gravity, I mean you probably don't have your water

tank forty feet above your house. Probably not, Yeah, So since you probably don't have that one, it uses instead in order to create the right amount of pressure that you're gonna need for your water. Um. They have uh an air bladder that's inside the water tank, so it's inflated and as you put water in, it compresses that bladder,

the bladders pushing against the wall water. Um. And then once the water has hit the right level, and when you turn on the faucet, the bladder is pressing against the water, the water comes out the right pressure until the bladder has you know, extended about as far as it can. Then the water tank needs to be refilled by the pump. So that that's your basic system, although

there are other ones too. If you have a if the water table is deeper than a jet pump may not be strong enough to create the vacuum necessary to pull the water up that height. Because the higher you go, the heavier that you know, the more the more energy need, the more more exactly, the more work you have to do, and so you might have something called a double drop jet pump or even a submersible pump, where the pump itself is under the water as opposed to at the

top of the well. And in this case you would just have another kind of approach to drawing water up this very long tube and again filling up a tank, just as you would with the jet pump. So those are the other ways of getting water, uh, you know, the basic ways that you would see in today's world, at least in the United States, right right, And well, you know, a lot of this technology and a lot of our infrastructure really has has been in place for

for over a hundred years. UM. A lot of our water towers, UM distribution lines, sewer lines, storage facilities, and stuff like that were built, uh, basically immediately following World War Two. So I mean, so all of this is is pretty simple. I mean, personal pumps have have developed a little bit and changed a little bit in the following decades, but but this technology has has not changed in a long time. And what we're saying, and yet we've added lots of stuff to it. So this is

where I'm talking about. How you know, the pipes that were used forty years ago are made of different stuff and are of different sizes, and the pipes that were used thirty years ago which are different from twenty, which are different from ten, which are different from today. So you've got this system where nothing is homogeneous at all, and and there, and the lifespans of all of these different products can can depend a lot on the materials that they were made from and how how carefully they

were installed. Not to mention the environment itself. If you are in a place like uh, the Great White North shout out to all of our Canadian fans, a uh, then you know they have to withstand much colder temperatures than say, down here in Hot Lanta. I hate myself for saying, and I didn't even notice for half a second, which makes me hate myself more. Well, um, yeah, okay, So so in that's that's in the US and other

parts of the world. I mean, we get we get not um not by global standards, a whole lot of water per capita here, but we we certainly get a lot more than many other places do. Yeah, and there are other places that have to get a lot more creative with how they manage water, how they get water, and how they distribute it. So for example, um, well, you know, I could talk about Abu Dhabi really quickly.

So now Abu Dhabi is is a the that are the the area of Abu Dhabi is so large and so populous, it could not have supported that population, uh like a century ago because the water management system just wasn't there. The area around Abu Dhabi has only two freshwater aquifers. All the other aquifers are salty, that's it's like seawater, and that there's no fresh water otherwise to access.

So they do have wells that they've um drilled down so that they can pull up some of the water from the freshwater aquifers, but that's almost exclusively used in agriculture. Usually almost seventy of fresh water of any given community is going to be used for agriculture, right, So in this case, what they've decided to do in order to supply the population with freshwater is built a lot of desalination plants, and we've talked about those in a previous

episode of tech Stuff. Go back and search if you want to look at our discussion. We actually got to speak with an expert about the salination plants and how they're are different methods of removing salt from seawater so you can make it drinkable. Um So that was a creative way that they have used to meet the needs

of their population. Right. And you know, most of the United States uh water infrastructure was was built up in the midst of the industrial era, when everyone is starting to move from urban areas or move i'm sorry, from from rural areas to urban areas. And those kind of population shifts that we saw in the early to mid twentieth century are just happening now in a lot of

developing countries. So the Third World Center, for for example, estimates that there's two billion people without access to safe drinking water in Asia alone. That's yeah, it really just just depends on on your your rainfall, your river, access, your groundwater, all all of those natural resources. Um and and for for another example, um Iceland. Okay, let's let's if you're talking about the cubic meters of fresh water

per capita, per per per person in a country. Um Iland has about five three thousand cubic meters of water freshwater per capita. Okay, Bow rain for example, has three disparity, not three thousand, just just three. That's Yeah, so obviously you have to get creative with the way that you

are able to access and distribute water, right. And then after you have accessed and distributed that water, Um, you know, most people use water to do some stuff and then they want it to sort of go away, right, So we need to talk about how to reclaim that water and what you do with that water once you've used it. You know what, I got a great idea. Yeah, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor and we'll

come back and talk about that. Excellent alright, So just before the break, lawn, you brought up a great point. You know, we don't just use water to drink. Obviously, we use it for all these other sorts of things, whether it's taking a shower or washing dishes or in the toilets. There are a lot of different ways we use it. We might use it to water our lawns. And then once we use it, what do we What

happens then? I mean, it goes down the drain for most of these cases, apart from the water in the lawn example, but you know it goes down the drain. What happens then? Well? Okay, so so following this entire gravity model. Um, most of the time waste water waste facilities are going to be located in some kind of

low lying area. Yeah yeah, and it makes sense again because that means you let the gravity pull the water where it needs to go, so you don't have to have pumping stations to keep wastewater going, because then you're spending energy just to get rid of wastewater. So yeah, you've got you know, the drain systems, whether they're on the roads or whether they're in the uh there in your house whatever, These all kind of lead to a water treatment facility. You've got pipes, you've got sewer tunnels,

all that fun stuff. You've got the manholes that allow people to have access in case they need to to do maintenance on any of this system. And it's really good, by the way, to have these treatment facilities instead of just dumping waste water into into natural rivers, for example, because that will therefore, um, you know, allow you to not totally pollute your natural rivers, right, and also not give a terrible statement to anyone who lives down river

of you, right exactly have fun drinking stupid. Yeah, that's not a great message. Okay, So so the basic the basic format of a water treatment facility. All right, so um this all right, guys, you know I'm going to give you the straight poop on this. There's gonna be some potty talk here and uh, you know it's something that we need to know about. All right. First, you got a screen. Okay, Once you get to the water treatment facility, you have you have different levels of water

purification depending upon the sophistication of the facility. Sure that this will occur in several steps. The first is a physical step where where you are just just literally screens to take solid waste out of your water as much of the solid wastes as you can. Now, these screens aren't aren't incredibly fine so that they take out all particulate matter, but they get a lot of it, a

lot of the larger solids. Uh. Now, the water that is left from that first screening process moves into ponds or pools, and then it's allowed to sit there for a while so that sediments in the waters start to settle into the bottom of that pool. You then end up removing that waste that tends to be about half of all the waste that's in that water at that moment, So it's still there's still quite a bit suspended within

the water itself. But to get rid of about half of it that way, Uh, that's waste you will then dispose of either by putting in a landfill or maybe in an incinerator. I keep hoping for these plasma generators so that you could use it because any organic matter you could turn into sin gas, which synthetic gas that would actually be a fuel. But mr mr fusion make it go. We're still not there yet. So uh, so you've gotten rid of about fifty of the waste, that

means you still got fifty percent left in the water. Uh. You then allow that water to be treated with various chemicals, mainly chlorine, which is used to kill off a lot of harmful bacteria. All right, for your for your very basic water treatment, you can then treat it with chemicals to get rid of um, anything really nasty that's still living in there. Yeah, you might use a little bacteria first to eat up any organic matter, and then use the chlorine to kill off everything. But then at that

point you essentially discharge it. Assuming that it's a simple water treatment plant. But there are more sophisty ones that have more steps. Would you like to know about the other steps? Sure? I think that they involve more bacteria, don't they do? You start off with some errated tanks that hold the water and the bacteria, and that those bacteria end up consuming almost all of the waste inside that water in fact around it. And that's that's it's really cool to me that they that they use gross

stuff to eat the gross stuff they don't want. And then um, but but but but then you need to get rid of that first gross stuff, right, Yeah, You move the water over into settling tanks, and then you remove that bacteria. You can treat the water again with chemicals to do that, uh, And by this time you are down to just uh, like of all the waste that you had had in that water to start with.

Then you can treat it with other chemicals or remove stuff like nitrogen and phosphorus which tend to build up, use the chlorine to kill off any of the remaining bacteria, and then you discharge the water into whatever. You know. Usually it ends up going through some canal systems and into another river eventually, but at this point it's, uh, it's you know, clean water. I don't know that you would necessarily want to stand at the end of it with a glass and say yum yum. But maybe maybe not.

But but it's at least, you know, okay for being released into the environment relatively as waste water goes. And and to be fair, I mean, there's I want to address this because it's just one of those things that occurred to me. I don't mean to suggest that water it can hold on to certain attributes just because it came into contact with something, because that's not the case. I mean really, technically, we're all we're all running around

drinking dino blood, right. Yeah, So that's your basic approach is essentially going through this multi step process to remove waste. And and by basic, we mean this is actually very complex, very expensive to build these facilities and uh and the result of of decades of research. There's filtering technique. There's actually if you want to see a more detailed approach to how this is done in a real system, there's a fun little documentary that's on YouTube. It's before Fawcett,

after flush I believe his West. Yeah, yeah, you were talking about that. It's about the Chicago water system, which is phenomenal. They have like, at least at the time of the documentary, they had the world's largest water treatment facility and they get their their water from the Great Lake and uh, it's interesting. They have all these tunnels that are underneath the lake that allow lake water to go through. And it's a really cool documentary. It's like

seven minutes long. So we'll link to it because, um if you want to see more of a step by step process and kind of see animations of what is going on the stuff that I just described, it has all of that. It's really good. But but yeah, you know, so not not everywhere in the world has these these wonderful treatment facilities and um and it can be a huge problem for the spread of diseases. Um Uh. Like remember how I said there's estimates of two billion people

in Asia without safe drinking water. There's an estimated additional three billion there without safe sanitation and water waste management. Right, So, on top of the fact that there are billions of people who don't have access to an adequate water or waste management system, there's an environmental concern with any type

of water system, right. Well, anytime that you're moving around a large natural resource like water, you're you're gonna be You're gonna be screwing with the natural system of things, right, I mean, which which is on purpose and which is good because it lets people um survive, but bad and that you can really mess with the ecology of a

local area. Yeah, you need to take in to consideration everything from the water that you're taking, Like wherever the reservoir happens to be, whether it's a lake or a river or even an artificial reservoir, where is that water coming from, how is it affecting the ecosystem of the area from which you are taking, And then everything from the amount of water that people are using, because water is not you know, you may have seen things on television or you know a little reminders in school about

don't waste water. A lot of that has to do with not just the fact that there's you know, there's uh, it's a renewable resource, but there's only so much of it any particular region has at any particular time. It's also an energy concern because it takes a lot of energy to gather this water from the source, and even using gravity, we're still talking about having pumping stations things like that. So the more water you use, the more energy has to be uh consumed in order to continue

that that supply of water. Right here in the US, I think that the e p A reported that, um, we use three or four percent of our countrywide energy getting water where it needs to go. And and that's that's on a national level, and that's only because most of that is dealt with by municipal systems, where water treatment is usually the largest consumer of energy without any

given community. Right So, I mean, clearly there are a lot of concerns for using water wisely, and then of course the whole treatment process and how that water once treated as then introduced back into the environment. All of

these things have an impact. And if the if the treatment facility isn't truly sophisticated, or if it's not adequate, then you could be making a catastrophic effect on your environment, which in turn can either directly affect the population that's getting the water in the first place or other populations that are downstream or nearby. Right. Yeah, this this can also get really political. Um yeah, in fact, even within

the United States, it can get political. I know that sounds of crazy, especially to people who may live outside of the US and they think of it as a nation, but we're divided up into states obviously. And uh, here's a perfect example, Lauren and I. We live in Georgia. We have two states that border US that use very similar sources of water, the same source of water at least for certain regions, Alabama and Florida. They all are

using water that is coming from come downstream from US. Yeah, from the Chattahoochee actually, and Alabama and Florida often are um competing for those resources along with Georgia. So if Georgia decides to do something on a state level that's going to affect that water source, it impacts these other states, and you get this kind of tension. This is within one country where yeah, yeah, and internationally it can get

pretty messy. I just just for example, most of Iraq's water supply originates and rivers in Turkey, which means that for for Iraq to get the water that it needs, conservation efforts have to begin in a whole other country that they might not be agreeing with very much at the time. Right. So if you have one country that says, you know, well, we'll conserve as much as we need to for our needs, but why should we be considered, and why should we worry about your needs you're you

don't you're not part of our country. That's sticky, that's that's you know. I mean obviously it raises up very tricky ethical questions, and you know, you may not be at all uh able to affect those the answers to those questions if you aren't in that particular country. So

you know, it does get pretty sticky. I will say, Yeah, there's there's a whole bunch of different problems that that really go on with uh, with with water and how we're going to kind of bring these old methods of getting it places and treating it into the future because you know, we're the population is growing. We're certainly not

going to have less need for water anytime soon. Yeah, so some things that we can look into or things like using uh different approaches for agriculture, which would obviously put less of a demand on our water use. If we're using fresh water for agriculture, and we can come up with plants that either need less water, or we come up with farming techniques that don't use as much water.

Because I mean, there there are other byproducts to this too, Right, If you have an enormous field that is treated with various types of herbicides, pesticides, that kind of thing, and you're using massive amounts of water to distribute those you get run off of all those chemicals that can then enter the local water table and that can be a big problem. So, I mean you can see that this

is not a simple system. It's very complex. Absolutely. And and also according to the e P, a um of water treated by water systems is lost to leaks um in some systems that can be as much as six The worldwide average is about twenty and and that's you know, that's a huge amount. All right, So let's talk a little bit. And you know, we've talked about the challenges in the state of the art as it is today, but there are people who are working on some pretty

cool stuff that could in theory really revolutionized water systems. Right. Oh, absolutely, Um, some of some of the more some of the more down to earth. I'll cover those first methods. Some some researchers are talking about the simple act of diverting watershed of the physical area of land from which you would get your water. Right because because classically your your watershed is far away from a city, basically, um, nothing to

do with your cities. But in in these are modern times, we've got so many more people living in urban areas and um, so much wasted water coming down in rainfall on these large urban areas that if we if we look at at just increasing the system capacity of cities to deal with that water by by replacing concrete with porous pavement, by adding more plant life to cities, by restoring wetlands, or or installing rain barrels and other building

gray water management systems, right, Yeah, gray water is one of those things that can be incredibly useful for particular applications. I mean, obviously it's not something that you would necessarily say, let's hook this up to yeah, and then I'll drink and then I'll drink, or a bubbler if you prefer. Yeah, gray water being um, the the basically clean wastewater that

comes from mild householder or commercial applications. Right, And there's plenty of different uses we could put that to rather than using I mean, it really does water alan Absolutely, it's really crazy to think that we have incredibly fresh water in our toilets. Yeah, that's that's one of those things that drives me completely. Just when you think that there are two billion people in Asia who do not have access to clean water, and we're using drinking water

in our toilets. Yeah, so see, using gray water in a system like that could end up meaning that that water could be used in other applications. Obviously, the big problem with the two billion people in Asia is that they don't have the systems in place or the resources

available to them. It's not just that the Earth has an x amount of fresh water that's evenly distributed across the entire planet, like we're saying, yeah, and you know, it's it's not the kind of thing where you know, if if you if you avoid flushing your toilet, that's not going to give water to the poor kids in China, like like it's yeah, it's like we said, it's a little more complicated than that. Okay, so that makes sense. Yeah, And in some communities are already doing a whole lot

for that. We mentioned in in that in that listener mail from Valerie, she she had mentioned Las Vegas systems and they are using a lot of water reclamation in order to to to stretch the water as far as it will go because they're kind of in a desert. Yeah, not one of those areas where they've got, you know, huge reservoirs that are naturally occurring nearby. It's a little tricky and I don't know if you know this, but Las Vegas is kind of a big city. It's got

a few people, a few people in it. I'll be there soon enough for ce. Yes, that's right, that's coming up. It's kind of exciting. Also, currently happening lots of new technology in recycling, purification, and desalination. Yeah, we we've seen things like the water reclamation technology that NASA has pioneered has been amazing. Like if you look at the stuff

they have on the International Space Station. And it's not just NASA, obviously, there are other space organizations, European space organizations, uh, Russian space organizations that have all contributed to this kind of body of science and technology. But they really make water go as far as it possibly can with the cost of what dollars for a pound of stuff to

send into space, right, you know, every every ounce counts. Yeah, you don't wanna, you don't want to be constantly they're thirsty again, gotta lug up another hundred pounds of water go to the bank. No, it's it's you know, they have systems that recapture water from everything from the water vapor and their breath, the sweat, urine, things like that. You know, not all this water necessarily goes right back into drinking water either, but it's necessary for the system.

So we can learn from that and use those same sort of technologies and various applications here on Earth, not all of them. Obviously. We're not gonna have giant water vapor uh condensers out there capturing everyone's breath, but probably probably not in most buildings. Um but I would I don't know, we might get one in here someday, but if we could, that would be that would be terrible and lovely. I feel like Robert would love a love

an art project about that. Um but but yeah, there's there's lots of really interesting materials and membrane sciences, different electrical properties of different things. We talked about that a bunch in our forward thinking episode of desalination, which is of course, and I mean that is a nice solution to getting drinking water when you don't have any fresh water in your Yeah, and there we've also seen some cool filtration systems that can be used to purify water.

If you have access to water but it's not pure, you can run it through these things. Dean Cayman worked on one. I know that Bill Gates is really behind technologies that are being developed for developing nations that may have problems getting clean water, and you just you pour this stuff in on one end and again gravity pulls the water through the various systems until at the end of it you get potable drinking water, which is pretty phenomenal stuff. Now, these are are small, They're meant for

small communities. They're not you know, something that's going to support an enormous city, and you might need multiple units depending upon how large the population of that area is. But it's really promising. But but Lauren, I want to know about a crazy kind of science fiction e E E approach to totally renovating the water system. Get anything for me? I do. In fact, um, have have you heard of

four D printing? Oh? My gosh, four deep printing. I remember seeing a devastatingly handsome bald Man talk about that on a video not to long ago. He's kind of narcissistic, though, I don't know. It's okay, it's okay. When you look that good, it's completely justified. There there was an episode, there's another separate episode of forward Thinking that was all about forty printing and and this is kind of a kitchy catchphrase, um, but it's we're talking about self assembly really.

Um So, So okay, M I T has a self assembly lab that's being run by one Skylar Tippets. Great name, it is a great name. Um he's he's an architect and and comps I and artist kind of dude. And um in in M I t S word, self assembly is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through local interaction. And so what they're really interested in here is is using material science and biological science

to create mostly analog devices that can react to changing situations. Right, So, and and usually it means that you're adding some form of energy or introducing some new element to this material, which will then undergo a change in shape or form. Right. This is a really proof of concept kind of stage.

Right now, they're there at this at this very basic like they've built a long tube that, when dropped in water well morph to form the letters M I T. Yeah, And they had they had one flat piece of it looks like just plastic, but when you put water on it, it would form itself into a cube. Um. Yes, you know you could watch the video and then you see that it's sped up by about eight times, and you realize this is a gradual process. It's really slow. I mean all of this is thanks to a multi material

form of three D printing. Um. And the four D in in the fourth dimension and in the four D title is time. Um. But but but so so multi material three D printing. Since different materials can have different water absorption properties, Um, you know you can. You can build them so that they will squish up in different ways. Right, You've got you've got an interesting approach where you've got this material that can actually react to changing such a waans.

So if you engineer it so that it behaves a particular way under a particular se circumstances, there are a lot of applications that you could put this to, including completely revolutionizing a water system. Yeah. I mean, you know, anything is huge as as a water system is a really long way off from from a cute little tube that spells out a cute little thing over of course of several minutes. Um. But but you know, imagine a pipe that changes shape to accommodate spikes in in in

watershed or water waste or frozen water. Right. Soe now this would be amazing because, like we had said over and over again, the water systems we have have formed over several decades, and they're not uniform at all, and they you know, some of the pipes are different sizes than other pipes, and you know, you might have it where certain parts of a city may have trouble meeting the water needs of that particular part of the city

compared to others just because the infrastructure doesn't really support

it anymore. If you had pipes that could adjust to the right to the to the level of demand, then if the population fluctuated, if it went, you know, got bigger or smaller, the pipes themselves, in theory, could end up adjusting themselves to meet whatever the new demand was to create the optimum water pressure for the amount of people that it needed to serve um Or what about a pipe that could shift itself to self repair damage.

And even more freaky than that, which is already amazing, the idea of you don't have to worry so much about maintenance because the pipes maintain themselves. They won't really break because they can just move bits around. It's another thing that I think is amazing is this idea of an undulating pipe. Now this is way off into science fiction future, right, absolutely, but but the the idea of this is that the pipe can undulate to push water

through itself. So in other words, you don't need pumping stations. You don't even need to worry about gravity anymore. You've got pipes that can change their shape and propel the water through them, providing the water pressure you need. And it's all built into of the material itself. You don't have any electronic parts, you don't have any generators. Yeah, it's just doing it on its own because of the way that it was constructed. And that's really what I

find phenomenal. It's not like there's some tiny electronic component inside this stuff. No, it's literally the way it was built. Yeah, and just because it was built this way, it will react you know, in X way when why happens because in some cases it's things like kinetic energy, right, Like if you know, you might have a sheet of this stuff and if you throw it on the ground, it turns into a chair over the course of like minutes. But anyway, I think the connect ones are a little

bit quicker. Yeah they can be. Yeah, but that would be you know, that's the kind of stuff we're talking about now. Granted again this is sci fi science stuff. Does have a really great Ted talk that will link to. But but you'll see in this Ted talk he presents a couple examples of what they're doing right at this very moment, and it is much less impressive than we've just made it sound, um, but the potential assuming that

we can get it to work. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what what what people wind up doing with that. Yeah, I'm sure we're only you know, thirty to fifty years away, right right around the same time that we hit the singularity and right around the time you know, singularity robot uprising and undulating pipes. They're all going to come on a Tuesday, So we'll be recording forward thinking, assuming we're all still around at that point. I mean, I got no plans. So anyway, this was

one of those topics I thought was really interesting. You know, it had a historical element to it that was fun to talk about. It has a real impact on us today, right now, and the promise of technology in the future has at least the potential to make it a phenomenally interesting uh system that we could see, you know, in a few decades. Assuming that that this is everything's working out. Obviously it's a lot of work that we're talking about here,

but sure even just just just big data and monitoring techniques. Um, getting everyone to work kind of together on this problem. UM, I think is going to be huge satellite data to to watch stuff. I mean, satellites can can detect changes in gravity that therefore detect changes in groundwater concentration. That's pretty incredible. Um. I didn't detect any changes in gravity, but I only saw the film once, so I have to see it at least one more time before I

could tell you what it changed. So, if you guys have anything to to say to us about this or other topics, why don't you write to us our email addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. You can find us with the handle of text Stuff H. S. W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it has to work dot com