Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don’t understand though is where the water goes that it can’t be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It’s my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what’s going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I’m confident that I’m missing something.
Thanks for your time!
First of all, in general it depends what kind of water is used - river, lake, ground water - but in this case it’s almost always easily accessible river and lake water, because it’s the cheapest (surprise, surprise).
This is actually much better than it would have been with underground aquifers, because those take long years to refill.
However, whenever you collect river or lake water and evaporate it, it’ll almost never return as rain in the exact same place. Partially because that’s just how it works, and partially because climate change is affecting rain patterns almost everywhere.
So if you quickly use up half of an entire river - a good amount of the water will return as rain, but away from the river, so the river will still shrink. This is bad, because ecosystems depend on rivers and lakes, including people. It also doesn’t mean new rivers or lakes will be created elsewhere. All our current lakes and rivers have been created over millenia. Depending on where all that extra rain falls - the water may not even have a positive impact, e.g., because it’ll cause a flood.
Depending on the specific geographic location, some of the water may be completely wasted, because the rain will fall into the sea. In the middle of the country (US) it’s pretty much 0%, but closer to the shore it may be nearing 100%.
There’s also the problem of some data centers ignoring ecological regulations, and dumping all kinds of waste into the same rivers they use for cooling. There was at least one case of an xAI data center seriously polluting a river.
The single biggest issue is just the scale of water extraction. Most of humanity’s water use has been slowly growing over thousands of years, with appropriate infrastructure built and ecological research conducted. Not exactly true in the US (go figure), but I’m simplifying.
Big cities obviously use a lot of water, too. But they were built and populated over up to 300 years (or much more outside North America).
Now imagine adding several big citties worth of water consumption, all in just a few years, without any ecological oversight.
Excellent write up. Thank you for putting in the effort, this really helps.
Wait, same xAI that was using methane generators to run their datacenters in Tennessee, right?
Oop, turns out yes…
It almost seems like destroying the planet is their actual goal and if they’re lucky they generate petabytes of generated CSAM and “Mecha Hitler” as a treat.