Hacker News Reader

Comment by marci | Hacker News Reader

Before that happen, it will probably be cheaper to buy water from poorer countries, which will destabilize those regions (locals won't be able to buy their own water), and thus start war.

View on HN

Water is heavy, and almost none of the water used in the world is used for human consumption. It will never make more economic sense to ship water long distances than to move the economic activities that require it to the source of the water. This is leaving aside the subject of aqueducts, but there's really only so long you can make an aqueduct, and most countries border countries in roughly similar economic situations. Siphoning water from "poorer countries" via aqueducts is not going to be a thing.

> there's really only so long you can make an aqueduct

This doesn't make any sense. Oil pipelines cross continents.

Good luck watering your fields with a 1m diam pipeline...

Or, to expand on this, a gallon of oil makes a car go dozens of miles, while a gallon of water won't even flush a toilet; volumetrically, the US uses about 50 times as much water as oil.

I would suggest two 1m diameter pipelines, but I feel like one 1.4m diameter pipeline would be even cheaper.

There's no limit on how long you can make an aqueduct. We don't have long aqueducts because water isn't very valuable.

Fiji for example?

Vox recently covered the history of their Fiji Water brand.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/7/18171384/fiji-water-gir...

...owned by the Wonderful company, the same company that is the subject of the article...

They seem to believe there's a market at a particular price point for shipping water halfway around the world.

If only there was an example of something like this happening recently... [0].

[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/2012109936...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com