Necessity is the mother of all invention, and with Necessity also comes scale, and with scale comes less cost...
Desalination has been expensive because it is not necessary, the second it becomes necessary I bet you will see the costs drop..
If nestle had to use Sea water to fill their bottles I bet they would have a cheap way to do it right quick
I doubt scaling desalinization is as hard as hurling stuff into space, but it may not be easy to scale either. There are plenty of places on earth which are very dry, adjacent to salt water, and extremely rich and yet no great desalinization technologies have come from them.
You may have neatly (and politely) pinned down why we computer folks are so arrogant about how easy problems outside our direct field would be to solve, if only we were the ones “allowed” to solve them.
Why? Nestle just passes the cost on to the consumer, because where else are they gonna go?
Make it so.
There are more than a few places where desalination is necessary, and we still haven’t come up with a way to make it cheap.
The current issue is that there is just no way that we know of to reliably desalinate that isn’t super energy intensive, so it comes down to trading energy for water. That’s why desalination is expensive.
So maybe that will work out in the end if the economics make water expensive enough to trade energy for water.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Costs
Although that doesn't include irrigation..
EDIT: can even be economical for irrigation in some circumstances: https://www.fluencecorp.com/desalination-and-agriculture-les...
The ocean covers the majority of the Earth's surface. The ocean is full of salt.
Water which rains out over the oceans is unusable as drinking or irrigation water without expensive processing (desalination).
If historic rainfall patterns change, there is absolutely no requirement that the rain land anywhere useful for our existing infrastructure or human habitation.
Yes, the water won't disappear, but if the effect is rainfall hits the ocean, or say, flood-prone regions even harder then it normally does, it's still going to be coming down somewhere not useful to us.
The problem is not that we can't solve these problems, it's that is is staggeringly expensive to do so.