Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don't understand though is where the water goes that it can't be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It's my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what's going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I'm confident that I'm missing something.
Thanks for your time!
Some of this is that there is only so much to consume at a time. It's a problem for a while with farms in California and why there is rationing.
A very simplified example.
Say there is a high ground point. All of the rain falls there. It runs down a stream to the ocean, where it eventually evaporates and goes back to the high point where it rains again.
Basic cycle.
Say it rains 1000 gallons per day. Which is probably ridiculously low, but, again, simplified example.
Along the flow to the ocean route, 10 people build farms, each farm needs 100 gallons of water for their crops each day.
So it rains, the water flows, each farmer pulls their 100 gallons, nothing reaches the ocean anymore but it all still evaporates and goes back to the high point where it rains.
If an 11th farmer comes along, now things get broken, because the new 11th farmer also needs 100 gallons, but it only rains 1000 gallons a day. The farmers make it work, maybe they import a bit of water each or they make due with 90 gallons instead of 100.
Now let's take a new data center. They build right next to the top, and consume 900 gallons of water per day. The 11 farmers downstream, are now turbo fucked, along with the food they produce.
This also does not get into potential contamination, which should be filtered out as it evaporates because the contaminates don't evaporate, nor does it get into possible misleading claims about how "the data center does not use that much water" while omitting the power generators next door that are technically a third party company that technically are not "part of" the data center, that actually consume the water.
Of course the scale in this analogy is a bit wrong. The farmers would be using 2 orders of magnitude more than the data centers and most of it being for crops to feed to cows, not crops that humans eat. And at the end is a guy trying to get drinking water out of his faucet which isn't happening due to the farmers and the data centers