As anyone who has studied geography knows, the ocean covers about 71 percent of the Earth's surface area, but it is strange that when we live in such a water-dominated world, we always worry about water scarcity. Water is almost everywhere you look (except in deserts), beautiful clouds fill our skies, rivers cross the land on their way to the oceans, and when it comes to oceans, 71% of the earth's surface is covered with water. So why do people act like we're running out of water?
While a large proportion of the earth is covered in water, only 3 percent is available, to be precise, and only 1 percent of that is available and accessible, with most of the rest locked in permafrost or trapped in glaciers and ice caps. The rest of the planet is salty, with about 3.5 percent of every gallon of water made up of sodium. About 3% of the Earth's crust is also sodium. This is no coincidence, because salt is so easily soluble in water that it is constantly transported from high-elevation land to low-elevation oceans, and the salinity or saltiness of the oceans does change over time, depending on how much fresh water is in the form of ice. But for the most part, ocean salinity mirrors the amount of salt in the Earth's crust.
All terrestrial worlds, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars have very similar compositions because they all formed in the same area. But what does all this matter? Musk has talked about achieving his dream of colonizing Mars by 2050, and with Mars or colonists arriving, they will no doubt be living there soon. So what are we going to do about salt on Earth? The first and most obvious way to create fresh water from saltwater is thermal desalination, where sunlight-driven evaporation creates clouds of fresh water from the surface of the ocean, most of which condenses as rain and flows back into the ocean, but some of it falls into lakes that we humans use for drinking water, and some of it eventually turns into snow or ice 39bet-xsmb-xổ số tây ninh-xổ số binh phước-xổ số binh dương-xổ số đồng nai.
Another popular method of producing fresh water is called reverse osmosis, which works by forcing salt water through a barrier that is only porous enough for water to pass through, but not salt. Both techniques work, but both have some major problems. First of all, it's not easy to replicate the sun's natural activity. You can try boiling water long enough to produce a cup of fresh water.
There is also the issue of waste. In this case, desalination plants producing concentrated salt water as waste and reintroducing this concentrated salt water into the oceans on Mars, which is not a good option. Let us assume the most logical place for humans to settle on Mars, which would have to provide radiation twice lower than the average Martian air pressure and easy access to water in order to enjoy the closest Earth-like environment. Unlike Earth, Mars has no oceans to carry away waste salt. Instead, Martians had to find ways to use salt or store it away permanently. On Earth, we can use salt as much as possible. It has uses in agriculture, tanning, dyeing and bleaching, as well as in the production of pottery, soap and chlorine. It is also widely used in the chemical industry today.
Fortunately, Mars, like the moon, will almost certainly have reserves of fresh water ice, not salt water ice. The water ice we find on the moon for collection was deposited either by comets or by the solar wind interacting with oxygen in the topsoil. Either way, there will be fresh water on Mars, but only in the planet's northern hemisphere ice cap. In fact, Mars is full of traces of salt flats and saltwater lakes. So whether ice is fresh or salty on Mars largely depends on where you find it.
If ice is salty, it's probably saltier than Earth, because when water is lost to space or underground, seawater is concentrated. Earth's Marine life is adapted to 3.5 levels of salt, and the salt concentration here is probably several times that of Earth, almost the same as the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea contains almost 10 times as much salt as Earth, at 33.7%, and it is completely devoid of life except for algae and some microbes. There were no fish in the Dead Sea, and there was no life around it.
And even when the rains return, any Martian colonizers will experience erosion and mudslides on a scale that humans have never experienced before. Imagine billions of years of dust and muddy water washing down hills and mountains where there's not even a bit of grass. It could be even worse. And salt dissolves easily in water, so eventually water will run down into the salt from above and wash it off. This leaves behind caves that will one day form sinkholes. So, all in all, it's time to give up on Mars rather than the daunting task of bringing a dead world back to life, and maybe Musk's idea is fanciful after all.
But whether we go to Mars or not, we still need to make progress on desalination, and finding ways to sequester the waste salt. And saltwater greenhouse technology wouldn't work on Mars, where without strong winds to drive turbines or drive evaporation, solar panels would collect dust. Of course, we might be able to take advantage of Mars' thin atmosphere, which is so low-pressure that it boils salt water and turns it into fresh water vapor, which is a long way from colonizing Mars, don't you think?