The Solar System Is Awash In Water 72
An anonymous reader writes: NASA has published an article detailing the vast amount of water found on other worlds in our solar system. "There are several worlds thought to possess liquid water beneath their surfaces, and many more that have water in the form of ice or vapor. Water is found in primitive bodies like comets and asteroids, and dwarf planets like Ceres. The atmospheres and interiors of the four giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — are thought to contain enormous quantities of the wet stuff, and their moons and rings have substantial water ice. Perhaps the most surprising water worlds are the five icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn that show strong evidence of oceans beneath their surfaces: Ganymede, Europa and Callisto at Jupiter, and Enceladus and Titan at Saturn." They've released an infographic to accompany the article. It's also bolstered by new research from the Niels Bohr Institute, which confirmed that glaciers on Mars do contain a large quantity of water ice. These glaciers are separate from the ice caps, existing in belts closer to the planet's equator. This ice has a total volume of roughly 150 billion cubic meters — enough to cover the entirety of Mars' surface with one meter of ice (abstract).
Re:Fusion here we come! (Score:4, Informative)
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To the Oort we go!
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And a lot more than 3.4 times as difficult to reach. There's no shortage of deuterium on Earth, and no reason to go out there to get it.
Of course, this is good news should we ever need to put a fusion power plant on Mars, but there's many other much more immediate uses for the water, like virtually any sort of industrial activity.
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Mystery Solved (Score:2)
We found out where all of California's water has gone
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Damnit, I should have read the comments before posting about the aqueduct.
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California has plenty of water - they're not a landlocked state. They've got access to the largest ocean in the world for water.
Of course, the problem is it isn't USABLE for a lot of things.
The earth's surface is 2/3rds water. Unfortunately, freshwater makes up under 1% of that.
Actually... (Score:3)
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Exactly, California's problems are political in nature. They could have built proper infrastructure after the last drought, unfortunately, they decided that that was not a good way to spend the tax money.
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They could have built proper infrastructure after the last drought [...]
Which would have turned into calls about how the government is wasting money building infrastructure that will never be used.
All things are obvious with 20/20 hindsight.
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So, when it was recommended previously, and they chose to waste money elsewhere, you were all cool with it?
That part of California is practically a desert, not expecting the next drought is as boneheaded as can be. I believe the reasons they gave for not building the infrastructure was that it was too expensive to maintain when not in use. How expensive is that water now? Was it worth it?
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We've known for a long time where most of California's water goes: Big Farming.
However, California's politicians wouldn't dare to address that issue. California's farmers are millionaires, and very generous political campaign donors.
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Actually, as the farmers like to say, California's biggest statewide crop is grass. Namely, people's lawns. When you have people in Rancho Santa Fe using upwards of 350 gallons of water per person, per day for lawns, it's hard to get mad at farmers growing kale and artichokes.
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The governor’s order focused primarily on urban water use, even though California’s $45 billion agricultural industry accounts for the bulk of the state’s water consumption: roughly 80%
Source: http://www.economist.com/news/... [economist.com]
it's hard to get mad at farmers growing kale and artichokes.
No, its very easy to get mad. The government is clamping down on people who use 20% of the water . . . while leaving the Big Farming industry, who use 80% of the water untouched.
California needs to scale back on its farming industry. That's where the biggest savings in water usage could be made. The Feds could help out as well, by refusing to pay subsidies to farmers who try to raise crops in a desert.
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I rate food as more useful as a nice lawn.
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California doesn't have a drought; if they did, they'd have done something about the stupid laws and excessive waste of water.
It's not really all that shocking. (Score:2)
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Well, if the assumption has been the water arrived here through cometary bombardment, and that modern comets and asteroids contain a fair bit of water ... shouldn't we be assuming that there would have to be vast amount of water in the universe?
It sometimes people on the one hand keep saying "look at all the evidence of water", and then they turn around and say "holy cow, water".
It just seems like at this point we should expect there to be water. So I'm not sure why people still keep acting like we're the
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Of course, since water is the 'universal solvent' this does not bode well for us.
We're going to need a planet sized can of WD-40 to keep the galaxy from dissolving.
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LOL ... honestly, if you can have a cloud of alcohol [phys.org] in space which is 288 billion miles across ... given the sheer size of the universe, if there isn't a puddle of WD40 someplace in the universe I'll be surprised.
Billions and billions of galaxies containing billions and billions of stars ... there's probably an an entire Astro Glide Nebula or something, and one made of just chocolate pudding. ;-)
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Billions and billions of galaxies containing billions and billions of stars ... there's probably an an entire Astro Glide Nebula or something, and one made of just chocolate pudding. ;-)
Of course it may be possible to find a pizza shaped world carried on the back of four elephants who in turn are standing on the back of a gigantic star travelling turtle :-) (in memory of Terry Pratchett)
Infinity does not alwasy please (Score:1)
Just because there might be an infinity of alternatives does not mean all things are possible.
There is an infinity of rational numbers between 0 and 1,
but none of them is greater than 2.
--
Life is complex -- part real, part imaginary.
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Aqueduct (Score:2)
Maybe California can make an aqueduct.
Poor California (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe they can pull water from Uranus.
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Like the shake guarding his well in the arabian desert, you can't have. Unless you ~PAY~!
Do fries come with that sheik [merriam-webster.com]?
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So they left off the prefix.... 3 decimal places is close enough for Astrophysics....
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Actually, the article and summary are using long scale 'billion' not short scale 'billion', so the multiplier is 10^12 rather than 10^9. Us Yanks would call it 150 trillion cubic meters. See the wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org].
It's 3 orders of magnitude more water than most native English speakers would think.
Relativity (Score:5, Informative)
If it is true that Mars contains 150 billion cubic meters, that is still an infinitesimal amount compared to Earth. There is 1.35 billion cubic km [wikipedia.org] in all the oceans on Earth, which is to say 1.35*10^18, or 1.35 billion billion cubic meters. Most of the surface of the Earth is covered by water, not one meter thick, but averaging over 3000 meters.
98% [wikipedia.org] of the mass of the universe is hydrogen and helium. Only 1% is oxygen.
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According to the comments just above yours, the Mars number is using UK Billion, not US Billion, which would put the two numbers around on par with each other (1.5 b km^3 vs 1.35 b km^3 if I did my maths right).
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That's the thing about standards: there are so many and you don't have to reveal which one you are using!
I imagine water is fairly common Universe wide (Score:1)
It's not too much of a stretch to think life is just as common.
Math... It's wrong (Score:1)
Re:Math... It's wrong-correction (Score:1)
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I am calling bad math.
I just chalk it up to astrophysics.... 3 decimal places is near enough!
I'm guessing it's simply a copying mistake...
Water Schmater (Score:2)
Wake me up when they find whiskey.
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Gold: certain types of asteroids contain a decent amount of gold (and platinum group metals). After all, that's where all the gold in the Earth's crust came from.
Diamonds: There was a theory that Jupiter and Saturn had diamond cores. Hard to get to, though. It was a plot point in the book 2069: A Space Odyssey.
Oil: Methane is common (Uranus and Neptune have a shitload of it) and we're pretty sure Titan has lakes of ethane, methane, and propane. It rains methane there. I'm not a geochemist, but I imagin
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Dear Solar System, (Score:2)
No shit. (Score:2)
Water is what you get when pretty much anything containing hydrogen reacts with pretty much anything containing oxygen, two very abundant elements.
Awash in Water!?! (Score:3)
The Solar System is awash in water?!?!
That's the last straw. I'm gonna build an ark.
Anyone know where I can get a tape measure that measures in cubits?
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Cubit tape measure [leevalley.com] - scroll to the bottom. It's $6.50.
(Yes, I'm aware of what day that became available.)
Alien plots need to be rewritten (Score:2)
Scientist 1: "They're here for the water!!!!" /GASP
Nerdy Intern: "Actually, our solar system has tons of water that they don't need to waste resources destroying our civilization to gain access to it."
Scientist 1: "They're here for the WOMEN!!!! /GASP
So we're not going to get invaded? (Score:2)
I guess it's a good thing that aliens won't need to invade us for water. May I suggest they take some things that I'm sure aren't available anywhere else in the universe. Please take people who are famous for being famous such as an heiress to a hotel fortune, her friend with the big butt and friend's husband.
Cost? (Score:1)