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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

For what it’s worth I grew up with super markets and it still blows my mind. Has since I was a kid, how do I have strawberries in winter!?

It’s also what has enabled us to diversify. Easy to obtain any food, any time, without much meal prep.

I personally am still looking to grow, store and remain self-sufficiently. But it’s entirely a life style choice; built out of my fear for the further.

Ask yourself, can the next generation build supermarkets? I don’t know if they could. It’s an amazing work logistics. Further, it requires California and growing food in desert. It also requires an abundance of energy for transport AND international trade. All of which is under tremendous pressure.

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> Ask yourself, can the next generation build supermarkets? I don’t know if they could. It’s an amazing work logistics. Further, it requires California and growing food in desert. It also requires an abundance of energy for transport AND international trade. All of which is under tremendous pressure.

Yep. You're saying the quiet part out loud. Ssshhh.

So, basically - California needs nuke energy, & fast.

Easiest thing that should happen but never will. Can’t wait to see how things turn out, that being said.

And water, which is becoming more and more scarce

Carve out a giant semi-cone into the oceanside, acting as a static water inlet/basin.

Line surface area of cone w/heavy mirror array. Desalinate thru concentrated sunbeams.

Or something like that.

They are building giant solar desalinators in Saudi Arabia so this is maybe not far from the truth. https://wired.me/science/environment/desalination-solar-dome...

Getting water from the sea up to the desert would be a huge challenge in California, and right on the coast isn’t very sunny for most of it.

I'm not sure what they're attempting to describe in the article but so far seems to me like a child's toy compared to a proper multi-stage flash distillation plant (which uses multiple stages and decreased pressures at each stage to massively decrease energy requirements) -- and even those should use more energy than reverse osmosis plants.

California zoning laws wouldn’t allow that. And changing it would take decades of bureaucracy.

I wish I was joking.

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