You are probably thinking what the hell is this guy talking about? Food and water have been around since God put life on the earth! Well that is partially correct with the exception of a drought here and a famine there over the history of the human race. I'm sticking by my statement and here is why. Whether you want to believe it or not the climate is changing. We can argue until forever as to the reasons, but the fact is that the climate is obviously changing and we cannot predict if the changes are just temporary or for several hundred years.
Smart business people are always looking for "The Next Big Thing". I'm saying that Food and water will soon be at the top of the list because of climatic changes that can happen very rapidly and are in fact happening now. We may even need underground homes and offices to protect us from the sun and also save energy. I am a futurist and I really believe this.
So where does the business sector come in? Well for one thing only about one percent of the water on Earth right now is drinkable at this point and already in short supply even in the USA in many areas. We need to develop solar powered systems that are simple to build but produce huge amounts of clean drinkable water rapidly.
I say solar powered because when the rivers dry up there will be huge power shortages.
We cannot expect The Government to solve this problem because the politicians are too busy slandering and trying to destroy each other at every level. NASA isn't going to do it because they are spending most of their money on Mars programs. After all, it's more important that we get a colony on Mars and Terra-form the planet like they do on Star Trek, and besides, they have other more important things to do like making self glorifying PR films and making up new acronyms to confuse us so we won't know what the hell they are saying or doing! NASA should be spending their money solving the "The Earth Problem" not the "Mars non Problem"!
In case they haven't noticed the survival of the human race comes first - hellooooo! If they can't make a forest in Arizona then they damn sure can't make a forest on Mars so why don't they quit feeding us all the crap and get real. NASA could also mean
"No Americans Survive Atmosphere!"
So we have two serious problems to solve here and that is food and water. We need to ask anyone who has a brain to think about these problems really hard, make some experiments if you can, and keep notes for future reference. That's good science. Personally I know that making fresh water is not that difficult using solar power and also using gray water recycling for crops.
I believe the food problem is much more difficult because of the volumes of food and the growing cycle that is needed to support the ever growing population. We need to take a hard look at how the Asians raise food. They have developed some very clever solutions like raising duck weed in farm ponds and using it for food, animal feed, alcohol, diesel fuel and fish food. I have a duck weed project going myself right now since I read a 110 page Vietnamese report on the Internet. They have some pretty smart dudes in Southeast Asia.
Did you know that in America in this summer of 2012 we may lose as much as 60% of the corn crop due to the drought conditions? That is a huge number! We have to get our heads wrapped around these problems now.
My hope in writing this little think piece is that even if I can get a handful of inventive experimenters to take an interest in this serious problem then I have succeeded. Let's not wait until the last minute when it may be too late.
Walt Barrett
