December 11, 2013 • 51 mins
How do water systems work? We take a look at how water gets from a municipal system (or a well) to your home. Gravity is your friend!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in test with technology with text stuff from how
stuff dot com. Hey there, every one, welcome to text Stuff.
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren voc Obama, and today's
episode comes to you courtesy of a little listener mail
(00:25):
that's going old school, Lauren, and we don't have the
clacks and necessarily, unless Noel decides to get super creative
with this one, I'm looking over. He's giving me nothing
back put in a very quiet clack, maybe a gentle
Long time listeners know what I'm talking about. You guys
who joined fairly recently, let's just say we spared you.
But anyway, this listener mail actually came from Valerie, who
(00:48):
sent us an email and said, I would like to
suggest an episode on city water systems. I think how
different countries are creating a fish and water systems, and
also the system that's used in Las Vegas could be
interesting for a podcast. So many both so little potable water,
what is in our future? And we agree this would
be an awesome episode. So we suggested it to other people,
but they said we should do it. Yeah weird, Actually,
(01:12):
I I guess we we We have talked about this
a tiny bit over on forward thinking, which is a
thing that I think we've been saying a lot lately
on the show. Yeah. Yeah, And the Forward Thinking episodes
are in a lot of ways very closely related to
tech stuff because we're looking into the future now. Not
all of Forward Thinking's topics are technology topics. Some of
(01:32):
them are social or cultural or have our more science
oriented than tech oriented. But if you enjoy the show,
chances are you to enjoy that show too, especially since
two of the three hosts of that show are this show.
So just saying well, well, we'll let you do the
math on that one. Um. But yeah, So, so we
wanted to do this episode on the infrastructure systems that
(01:55):
exist today and historically and some of the things that
we are thinking about for that incredible and slightly terrifying future. Right, So,
first of all, let's talk about why is it challenging
to get clean water? Um? Lots of reasons, Lots lots
of reasons. Rain doesn't fall everywhere all the time that
(02:15):
people want to live. Um. Rivers don't flow everywhere all
the time people want to live. Sometimes river courses can
change over time. Yeah, Um, the climate is kind of changing.
That's that's a thing. That's happening. Um. And basically, even
though it's really expensive to create an upgrade infrastructure, UM,
(02:37):
it's way more expensive to repair damage caused by failed
infrastructure and or to just not let people have water. Um.
We don't last all that long without that stuff. So
when we get a little further into this episode, you're
going to realize, like, you know, some of the some
of the systems out there are a little little on
the elderly side. Yeah, and really, not not upgrading your
(02:59):
infrast structure is like playing chicken with entropy, because systems
break down, they do. And if you yeah, yeah, exactly,
and some of these systems look like it's, you know,
just a true mishmash because you know, as we know,
cities grow over time, some of them don't, some of
them decrease in size, but in general you see population
growth the change exactly. So and even if they do decrease,
(03:22):
that's another thing that you have to you have to
adjust for. Yeah, So you get you get all these
different types of add ons to existing infrastructure. That means
that not everything is the same. You might have, uh,
you know, four or five different generations of pipes in
one city's infrastructure, and you know, the more complexity you add,
(03:43):
the more likely something somewhere along the line is not
going to work the way you had anticipated. In other words,
stuff's gonna break and then you gotta fix it. But
let's let's take a look back, way back. Yeah, because
a lot of the basic principles upon which we have
based in our most modern systems on go back to
how far Roman times really? Yeah, so the Romans. You
(04:06):
may have heard about the Roman aqueducts and you might think, uh,
is that a hockey team. No, it's not that hockey team. Yeah,
I would too, centurions on on skates would be awesome.
But uh so the aqueducts were a system of channels
waterways that would bring water from distant places to Rome
(04:28):
because Rome was a city that was growing much too
large to be supplied by the local water sources. And
mostly the most famous aqueducts are the ones that you see.
They look like bridges from a distance. They're elevated. They're
built on these these stone columns, but they are not
bridges for road travel. They're actually water bridges. They allow
(04:49):
water to flow, and the reason why they're elevated is
because in order to make a pathway from the water
source the reservoirs that the Romans were using. It sometimes
meant that they had to cross things like valleys. Well,
it's really easy to go down a valley if you've
got water. It's hard to make the water go back
up the other side of the valley, right. It would
have to be going pretty fast because the way that
gravity works, and most most of the time things want
(05:11):
to go downwards and not upward. You would just have
created a river in that valley as opposed to making
the water go across. So by doing this aqueduct, if
you could have a kind of continuous grade so that
it was always going a little lower in elevation than
the earlier sections, you could induce water to flow. You're
(05:33):
letting gravity do the work for you. So the Roman
system had all these aqueducts, and most of them were
actually channels that were cut underneath the ground. Uh there
there are quite a few aqueducts that you can see
that are built up in their amazing feats of engineering.
But I think even more amazing to me anyway, as
(05:53):
the thought of all these under yeah, these channels that
have been cut into the living rock so that water
can flow through it. Um, and so the water would
flow all the way toward Rome, and then they would
direct it into giant cisterns, which are just enormous containers, right,
a big old container that can hold water. And these
cisterns would be in the tallest areas around Rome where
(06:17):
the water could still flow into, right, and then a
network of I believe they were using lead pipes at
the time, which was turned out to be problematic. They
were a little blind to the problems at the time.
Um when I would direct the water from from those
cisterns into into homes and fountains and other buildings, yep,
they would they would run these pipes down through the
(06:39):
various parts of Rome so that you could get access
to clean water easily, so you wouldn't have to trek
far like you know, because before this kind of system,
the basic way you got water was you walked to
the closest source of water, took you and you went
to some water yep, whether that was a river or
a lake or a well know, something like that, and
(07:01):
then you would bring that back and when you were
out you had to go back out again. This was
trying to make that much more accessible now. In total,
they're about two hundred sixty miles worth of aqueducts around
the city of Rome, which is pretty phenomenal. Bad for
a few thousand years ago. Yeah, and uh, they know
it was a pretty effective system. They let the gravity
(07:23):
do the work for them. They didn't have to build
uh lots of pumping stations, although they did have some,
but they didn't have to have as many as you
would think they'd need because they were latying. Gravity do
most of the work for them. Uh. And in fact,
that basic idea of letting gravity do a lot of
the work for you still applies today. Oh yeah, I've
(07:45):
been in buildings in New York where that's basically how
the water pressure works. They've got a water tower on
top of the building, and depending on on what level
you're on, you get better pressure because of how far
it's falling. My favorite is when you use the sinks
in this building and occasionally you get the sputtering noise
where it sounds like a a giant ball of cobras
(08:07):
is just on the other side of the faucet. Um.
You must use the specialist think I don't actually get
I'd show you, but you can't go into that room.
So let's talk about a couple of other pre industrial
civilizations besides the Romans, because you'd think, well, were they
the only ones who came up with this idea, And
the answer to that is no, No. Other other civilizations
(08:28):
knew that gravity worked. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't necessarily know
the mechanism of it or what it was, but they
knew that, hey, if you drop something, it falls, and
that if you if you look at water, it runs downhill,
not uphill. So you know, drawing those conclusions, you figure
out that you need to get water to this place
where a lot of people live, because it turns out
we need water. London was one of these places. London
(08:51):
built what is called the Great Conduit, which was another
massive channel that uh that brought water in to London,
actually to cheapside, two cisterns and cheapside that were then
hooked up to other cisterns around the city. And if
you were rich, you could afford to pay to have
pipes brought into your home so that you would have
(09:13):
running water in your home. If you weren't rich, sometimes
you would try and tap into a neighbor's pipes, which
could get you arrested or stealing water. Yeah, I imagine
that that also must with the system in ways that
made nobody happy. Yeah, you know, nothing like having an
enormous leak appearing where you did not expect one to um.
(09:35):
But yeah, that this was something that London started working
on in the in the thirteenth century. In the mid
twelve hundreds, I heard that Constantinople, Constantinople not stand bull.
Why they changed it, I can't say, but Constantinople also yeah,
they created a man made river, so again kind of
like the aqueduct system of Rome, but more of a
(09:58):
river than an aqueduct um. And it was allowed to
carry water both above and below ground. They had sections
where again it was they had cut channels into the
ground and the water would flow through there, and it
was carrying water from about two fifty kilometers away from
the city. Like the water source for the city was
(10:20):
two kilometers away. Now, when you look at this, like
when you look at most cities, like you look at
the if you look at a map of ancient civilizations,
for example, and you look at where the cities are located,
they're usually right around water sources, fresh water sources. Because
that was the most effective way of doing it. Yeah, so, uh,
(10:40):
you know, it's it's only fairly recently that we've gotten
to a point where if you live really far away
from fresh water sources, you can build a large city.
We've had smaller you know, smaller uh, towns and villages
and populations, nomadic tribes, things like that, that we're able
to exist on smaller sources of fresh water. But obviously,
(11:03):
if you if you want to have a city of
any size, you need access to a lot of water,
all right, And this can this can be a very
large problem. For for example, Singapore up until very recently
had to basically import all of their water from Malaysia.
And uh yeah, it's it's ended up springing up a
whole industry that I'm going to talk about in another
few minutes here. But um so it's so okay, um
(11:26):
in terms of in terms of our modern water infrastructure,
if you want to, you want to talk about that
a little bit. You're you're tired of the ancient world.
I understand, Lauren. I understand you don't want to dwell
in the past. I couldn't agree more, mostly because my
notes are out. I'm done with all the ancient stuff.
I don't have any other cities that can talk about, Lauren.
So I am ready to move into the future with
(11:47):
you boldly, yes and forcibly, where no man has gone before.
No one. Sorry, sorry forgot about the next generation an
old school. A lot lots of people are in the
these are modern times. That's not not like no one
has ever been here. We're here, that's true. Okay, So
let's talk about your your basic modern water system. It's
(12:07):
not that different in the sense that most of them
tend to still rely heavily on gravity. Note pun intended.
I didn't realize I was making one until I was done.
Uh not, not all of them do. Some water systems
use uh electric pumps and will just pump the water
to maintain the right kind of water pressure for their populations.
(12:28):
But more frequently than not, you're gonna see water towers,
particularly things like small towns. You'll you'll usually see as
you're going around the outskirts, you see that enormous tower
and you think, wow, you know, what is the point
of that? Why do you have this big tower just
holding water there? And if you're in a city, like
you said, Lauren, you might see on the rooftops, different
(12:50):
individual water towers. Yeah, so what is going on here, Well,
it's the same principle. You put the water at an
elevated location, and by that elevate location, the weight of
the water is providing the pressure you need to provide
the However, many households that water tower serves or businesses
or whatever, um with the right amount of water pressure
(13:12):
so that when you turn on the faucet water comes out. Now. Um,
your basic water tower is able to hold somewhere between
I don't know, twoe or fifty thousand gallons of water
to maybe five hundred thousand or more gallons of water
at it at a time, so big capacity. Can keep
in mind that your average swimming pool holds fifteen to
(13:33):
twenty thousand gallons of water, so working more water than
pretty big, not small, big lots of water and um
usually they are attached to some sort of well always
are attached to some sort of pumping station which can
pump water back up into the tower as well as
usually provide direct pressure to the community. So the way
(13:55):
this tends to work is one of two ways. You
can either pump all the water up into the water
tower until it reaches a certain level and then you
just stop. You turn the pump off. That way, you
can serve energy. That way, the gravity will pull the
water down, and for every foot that that water is elevated,
you get point four three pounds per square inch of pressure.
(14:16):
Most cities have between fifty and a hundred p s I.
So your water tower's height is going to determine what
that water pressure is. So you've got the pump turned
off the waters in the tower. When you, Lauren, decide
you want to have a tasty drink of water and
you turn on the faucet, then that allows the water
from that water tower to come down a little bit.
It's pushing all the water through the pipes. You get
(14:37):
water through your faucet. Everyone's happy, yea, assuming that all
the infrastructure is working properly, right, yes, So that is
that is the general assumption if the water comes on. Now, Lauren,
let's say that you decide you want a glass of
water at the same time as everyone else in town
has decided to take showers, flush the toilet, you know,
turn the faucet on outside for no reason whatsoeb or
(15:00):
water the lawn, wash, the car, et cetera. It's enough
so that the water in the water tower has gone
down to a level where it is no longer able
to supply that pressure. That's where the pump kicks in.
The pump is able to continuously supply more water, so
it's reaching the right pressure. It also, when people start
to calm down and decide they're not going to waste
(15:21):
so much water anymore, or drink it or whatever, it
can start to refill that water tower until it reaches
the optimum level. Again. Now, there are other systems where
the water tower is essentially a reserve unit. So the
water pump is taking water from a reservoir. Could be
a lake, it could be a river, it could just
be an artificial reservoir. It's taking water from that reservoir
(15:42):
and pumping it directly to the homes. And then any
time that the demand outstrips the capacity of the water pump,
the water tower is activated and supplements it. So either
way you have kind of the symbiotic relationship between the
pump and the tower. Now with the tower, the nice
thing is, because of gravity, you don't have to add
extra energy into the system to get the water to
(16:03):
where it needs to go. You don't have to have
all these pumping stations along the lines to keep the
pressure at the right level. So, you know, we think
about that for things like telephone lines. When we talked
about the telephone system, how they had to have relay
stations so that they could boost the signal throughout. The
same sort of thing with water pressure. Right if eventually,
if you're talking about it long enough, uh pathway that
(16:24):
pressure starts, you're going to lose motion resistance along the
path and you've got yeah, and you've just got too
much space to fill. So um, these are ways of
getting around that. So and with the gravity working for you,
you have to spend less energy overall. Pumping the water
up into the tower is more energy efficient because you're
(16:46):
just filling it up to where it needs to be
and then you stop, as opposed to consistently pumping water
to the entire population. So in general, that's how your
basic water tower works. Uh, it's pretty neat stuff. Actually,
I mean, I know it's it's a really simple system,
but I mean, but that's why it's so elegant. Of course,
(17:07):
that's not how everyone gets their water, bob. Right, When
you're further out from cities, you you're gonna either need
your own well or um which you are probably going
to need to use a pump in order to access. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So I mean, granted, you could think about the well
pumps there are, you know, the old style pump handle
where you're literally pumping, but more frequently we have electronic pumps. Now. Yeah.
(17:32):
Here in the U. S Alone, we've got some sixteen
million private wells, and we drill another five hundred thousand
every year. Yeah. And uh so if you live outside
of the city, um, which I used to. You know,
I used to live out pretty far out there, then
you may be using here in Atlanta, living like five
miles from downtown is considered a little bit outside the city.
(17:54):
But I'm sure I live in the city now, I'm
within the city limits. So yeah, no, no, you know,
actually outside where you can see the stars and stuff
like that, and cols and and bison occasionally, um, which
we're totally domesticated. We don't have wild bison in Georgia
as far as I know. Anyway, if you live out
in the in the sticks, as I would say, which
(18:17):
I used to, then you might have your own well,
or you might have a communal well of some sort.
But the way this works is you end up digging down.
See there's this thing called the water table that exists
underground and it's pretty much everywhere more or less. But
you have to dig at different depths depending upon where
you are right, depending on on how much rainfall a
(18:40):
location gets, and um the other runoff that kind of stuff,
and you know, lots of things will determine exactly how
far down you would need to go, and also the
quality of the water. We'll talk about that in a
second too. But if you happen to live someplace that
has good aquifers, like freshwater aquifers that are at the
you can access at the water table, you can dig
a hole and then eventually you know you should hit water.
(19:02):
And so for example, a shallow well might be or
or less down and with that you could use what's
called a jet pump. What is it jet pump too?
So jet pump, Well, it does is it pumps water?
But the way it does is kind of cool. You're welcome, Yeah,
So yeah, it uses electricity and it uses a little
(19:24):
bit of water that you already put into the pump.
It's called to prime the primate. It's drive water is
what's called. So it's got a little jet, a little
think of it like a nozzle that you would put
on the end of a hose. And you know, by
reducing the size of the pathway that the water can
go through, you also increase the pressure. You put a
little water in it to primate. You turn it on,
(19:46):
it starts to emit this water at high pressure. It
starts to create a vacuum, right due to the jet
of water flowing out, it creating suction inside the tube, right,
and the tube goes down into the well until it
hits where the water is actually goes further down than
that obviously, but then the water gets drawn up the
tube through that vacuum, yep, and then it gets sent
(20:08):
into a holding tank of some sort. So this isn't
you know. The wells that are being used are not
something that you know. When you turn on the faucet,
the well kicks in and then you have to wait
a while and the water comes out. The pump continues
to work until the water tank reaches its optimum level
and it turns off and then we'll come back on
when it when the water is depleted a certain amount,
(20:29):
so that you've kind of got your own little personal
mini water tower. Yeah. And since since you're not necessarily
using gravity, I mean you probably don't have your water
tank forty feet above your house. Probably not, Yeah, So
since you probably don't have that one, it uses instead
in order to create the right amount of pressure that
you're gonna need for your water. Um. They have uh
(20:51):
an air bladder that's inside the water tank, so it's
inflated and as you put water in, it compresses that bladder,
the bladders pushing against the wall water. Um. And then
once the water has hit the right level, and when
you turn on the faucet, the bladder is pressing against
the water, the water comes out the right pressure until
the bladder has you know, extended about as far as
it can. Then the water tank needs to be refilled
(21:12):
by the pump. So that that's your basic system, although
there are other ones too. If you have a if
the water table is deeper than a jet pump may
not be strong enough to create the vacuum necessary to
pull the water up that height. Because the higher you go,
the heavier that you know, the more the more energy need,
the more more exactly, the more work you have to do,
(21:33):
and so you might have something called a double drop
jet pump or even a submersible pump, where the pump
itself is under the water as opposed to at the
top of the well. And in this case you would
just have another kind of approach to drawing water up
this very long tube and again filling up a tank,
(21:53):
just as you would with the jet pump. So those
are the other ways of getting water, uh, you know,
the basic ways that you would see in today's world,
at least in the United States, right right, And well,
you know, a lot of this technology and a lot
of our infrastructure really has has been in place for
(22:13):
for over a hundred years. UM. A lot of our
water towers, UM distribution lines, sewer lines, storage facilities, and
stuff like that were built, uh, basically immediately following World
War Two. So I mean, so all of this is
is pretty simple. I mean, personal pumps have have developed
a little bit and changed a little bit in the
following decades, but but this technology has has not changed
(22:37):
in a long time. And what we're saying, and yet
we've added lots of stuff to it. So this is
where I'm talking about. How you know, the pipes that
were used forty years ago are made of different stuff
and are of different sizes, and the pipes that were
used thirty years ago which are different from twenty, which
are different from ten, which are different from today. So
you've got this system where nothing is homogeneous at all,
(22:58):
and and there, and the lifespans of all of these
different products can can depend a lot on the materials
that they were made from and how how carefully they
were installed. Not to mention the environment itself. If you
are in a place like uh, the Great White North
shout out to all of our Canadian fans, a uh,
then you know they have to withstand much colder temperatures
(23:19):
than say, down here in Hot Lanta. I hate myself
for saying, and I didn't even notice for half a second,
which makes me hate myself more. Well, um, yeah, okay,
So so in that's that's in the US and other
parts of the world. I mean, we get we get
not um not by global standards, a whole lot of
(23:40):
water per capita here, but we we certainly get a
lot more than many other places do. Yeah, and there
are other places that have to get a lot more
creative with how they manage water, how they get water,
and how they distribute it. So for example, um, well,
you know, I could talk about Abu Dhabi really quickly.
So now Abu Dhabi is is a the that are
(24:00):
the the area of Abu Dhabi is so large and
so populous, it could not have supported that population, uh
like a century ago because the water management system just
wasn't there. The area around Abu Dhabi has only two
freshwater aquifers. All the other aquifers are salty, that's it's
like seawater, and that there's no fresh water otherwise to access.
(24:24):
So they do have wells that they've um drilled down
so that they can pull up some of the water
from the freshwater aquifers, but that's almost exclusively used in agriculture.
Usually almost seventy of fresh water of any given community
is going to be used for agriculture, right, So in
this case, what they've decided to do in order to
(24:45):
supply the population with freshwater is built a lot of
desalination plants, and we've talked about those in a previous
episode of tech Stuff. Go back and search if you
want to look at our discussion. We actually got to
speak with an expert about the salination plants and how
they're are different methods of removing salt from seawater so
you can make it drinkable. Um So that was a
creative way that they have used to meet the needs
(25:08):
of their population. Right. And you know, most of the
United States uh water infrastructure was was built up in
the midst of the industrial era, when everyone is starting
to move from urban areas or move i'm sorry, from
from rural areas to urban areas. And those kind of
population shifts that we saw in the early to mid
twentieth century are just happening now in a lot of
(25:30):
developing countries. So the Third World Center, for for example,
estimates that there's two billion people without access to safe
drinking water in Asia alone. That's yeah, it really just
just depends on on your your rainfall, your river, access,
your groundwater, all all of those natural resources. Um and
and for for another example, um Iceland. Okay, let's let's
(25:54):
if you're talking about the cubic meters of fresh water
per capita, per per per person in a country. Um
Iland has about five three thousand cubic meters of water
freshwater per capita. Okay, Bow rain for example, has three disparity,
not three thousand, just just three. That's Yeah, so obviously
(26:16):
you have to get creative with the way that you
are able to access and distribute water, right. And then
after you have accessed and distributed that water, Um, you know,
most people use water to do some stuff and then
they want it to sort of go away, right, So
we need to talk about how to reclaim that water
and what you do with that water once you've used it.
(26:37):
You know what, I got a great idea. Yeah, let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor and we'll
come back and talk about that. Excellent alright, So just
before the break, lawn, you brought up a great point.
You know, we don't just use water to drink. Obviously,
we use it for all these other sorts of things,
whether it's taking a shower or washing dishes or in
the toilets. There are a lot of different ways we
use it. We might use it to water our lawns.
(26:58):
And then once we use it, what do we What
happens then? I mean, it goes down the drain for
most of these cases, apart from the water in the
lawn example, but you know it goes down the drain.
What happens then? Well? Okay, so so following this entire
gravity model. Um, most of the time waste water waste
facilities are going to be located in some kind of
(27:20):
low lying area. Yeah yeah, and it makes sense again
because that means you let the gravity pull the water
where it needs to go, so you don't have to
have pumping stations to keep wastewater going, because then you're
spending energy just to get rid of wastewater. So yeah,
you've got you know, the drain systems, whether they're on
the roads or whether they're in the uh there in
(27:40):
your house whatever, These all kind of lead to a
water treatment facility. You've got pipes, you've got sewer tunnels,
all that fun stuff. You've got the manholes that allow
people to have access in case they need to to
do maintenance on any of this system. And it's really good,
by the way, to have these treatment facilities instead of
just dumping waste water into into natural rivers, for example,
(28:04):
because that will therefore, um, you know, allow you to
not totally pollute your natural rivers, right, and also not
give a terrible statement to anyone who lives down river
of you, right exactly have fun drinking stupid. Yeah, that's
not a great message. Okay, So so the basic the
(28:25):
basic format of a water treatment facility. All right, so
um this all right, guys, you know I'm going to
give you the straight poop on this. There's gonna be
some potty talk here and uh, you know it's something
that we need to know about. All right. First, you
got a screen. Okay, Once you get to the water
treatment facility, you have you have different levels of water
(28:46):
purification depending upon the sophistication of the facility. Sure that
this will occur in several steps. The first is a
physical step where where you are just just literally screens
to take solid waste out of your water as much
of the solid wastes as you can. Now, these screens
aren't aren't incredibly fine so that they take out all
particulate matter, but they get a lot of it, a
(29:06):
lot of the larger solids. Uh. Now, the water that
is left from that first screening process moves into ponds
or pools, and then it's allowed to sit there for
a while so that sediments in the waters start to
settle into the bottom of that pool. You then end
up removing that waste that tends to be about half
(29:27):
of all the waste that's in that water at that moment,
So it's still there's still quite a bit suspended within
the water itself. But to get rid of about half
of it that way, Uh, that's waste you will then
dispose of either by putting in a landfill or maybe
in an incinerator. I keep hoping for these plasma generators
so that you could use it because any organic matter
you could turn into sin gas, which synthetic gas that
(29:50):
would actually be a fuel. But mr mr fusion make
it go. We're still not there yet. So uh, so
you've gotten rid of about fifty of the waste, that
means you still got fifty percent left in the water. Uh.
You then allow that water to be treated with various chemicals,
mainly chlorine, which is used to kill off a lot
of harmful bacteria. All right, for your for your very
(30:11):
basic water treatment, you can then treat it with chemicals
to get rid of um, anything really nasty that's still
living in there. Yeah, you might use a little bacteria
first to eat up any organic matter, and then use
the chlorine to kill off everything. But then at that
point you essentially discharge it. Assuming that it's a simple
water treatment plant. But there are more sophisty ones that
have more steps. Would you like to know about the
(30:31):
other steps? Sure? I think that they involve more bacteria,
don't they do? You start off with some errated tanks
that hold the water and the bacteria, and that those
bacteria end up consuming almost all of the waste inside
that water in fact around it. And that's that's it's
really cool to me that they that they use gross
stuff to eat the gross stuff they don't want. And
(30:52):
then um, but but but but then you need to
get rid of that first gross stuff, right, Yeah, You
move the water over into settling tanks, and then you
remove that bacteria. You can treat the water again with
chemicals to do that, uh, And by this time you
are down to just uh, like of all the waste
that you had had in that water to start with.
(31:13):
Then you can treat it with other chemicals or remove
stuff like nitrogen and phosphorus which tend to build up,
use the chlorine to kill off any of the remaining bacteria,
and then you discharge the water into whatever. You know.
Usually it ends up going through some canal systems and
into another river eventually, but at this point it's, uh,
it's you know, clean water. I don't know that you
(31:34):
would necessarily want to stand at the end of it
with a glass and say yum yum. But maybe maybe not.
But but it's at least, you know, okay for being
released into the environment relatively as waste water goes. And
and to be fair, I mean, there's I want to
address this because it's just one of those things that
occurred to me. I don't mean to suggest that water
it can hold on to certain attributes just because it
came into contact with something, because that's not the case.
(31:57):
I mean really, technically, we're all we're all running around
drinking dino blood, right. Yeah, So that's your basic approach
is essentially going through this multi step process to remove waste.
And and by basic, we mean this is actually very complex,
very expensive to build these facilities and uh and the
result of of decades of research. There's filtering technique. There's
(32:18):
actually if you want to see a more detailed approach
to how this is done in a real system, there's
a fun little documentary that's on YouTube. It's before Fawcett,
after flush I believe his West. Yeah, yeah, you were
talking about that. It's about the Chicago water system, which
is phenomenal. They have like, at least at the time
of the documentary, they had the world's largest water treatment
(32:41):
facility and they get their their water from the Great
Lake and uh, it's interesting. They have all these tunnels
that are underneath the lake that allow lake water to
go through. And it's a really cool documentary. It's like
seven minutes long. So we'll link to it because, um
if you want to see more of a step by
step process and kind of see animations of what is
(33:02):
going on the stuff that I just described, it has
all of that. It's really good. But but yeah, you know,
so not not everywhere in the world has these these
wonderful treatment facilities and um and it can be a
huge problem for the spread of diseases. Um Uh. Like
remember how I said there's estimates of two billion people
in Asia without safe drinking water. There's an estimated additional
(33:25):
three billion there without safe sanitation and water waste management. Right, So,
on top of the fact that there are billions of
people who don't have access to an adequate water or
waste management system, there's an environmental concern with any type
of water system, right. Well, anytime that you're moving around
a large natural resource like water, you're you're gonna be
(33:46):
You're gonna be screwing with the natural system of things, right,
I mean, which which is on purpose and which is
good because it lets people um survive, but bad and
that you can really mess with the ecology of a
local area. Yeah, you need to take in to consideration
everything from the water that you're taking, Like wherever the
reservoir happens to be, whether it's a lake or a
river or even an artificial reservoir, where is that water
(34:10):
coming from, how is it affecting the ecosystem of the
area from which you are taking, And then everything from
the amount of water that people are using, because water
is not you know, you may have seen things on
television or you know a little reminders in school about
don't waste water. A lot of that has to do
with not just the fact that there's you know, there's uh,
(34:34):
it's a renewable resource, but there's only so much of
it any particular region has at any particular time. It's
also an energy concern because it takes a lot of
energy to gather this water from the source, and even
using gravity, we're still talking about having pumping stations things
like that. So the more water you use, the more
energy has to be uh consumed in order to continue
(34:57):
that that supply of water. Right here in the US,
I think that the e p A reported that, um,
we use three or four percent of our countrywide energy
getting water where it needs to go. And and that's
that's on a national level, and that's only because most
of that is dealt with by municipal systems, where water
treatment is usually the largest consumer of energy without any
(35:19):
given community. Right So, I mean, clearly there are a
lot of concerns for using water wisely, and then of
course the whole treatment process and how that water once
treated as then introduced back into the environment. All of
these things have an impact. And if the if the
treatment facility isn't truly sophisticated, or if it's not adequate,
(35:39):
then you could be making a catastrophic effect on your environment,
which in turn can either directly affect the population that's
getting the water in the first place or other populations
that are downstream or nearby. Right. Yeah, this this can
also get really political. Um yeah, in fact, even within
the United States, it can get political. I know that
sounds of crazy, especially to people who may live outside
(36:02):
of the US and they think of it as a nation,
but we're divided up into states obviously. And uh, here's
a perfect example, Lauren and I. We live in Georgia.
We have two states that border US that use very
similar sources of water, the same source of water at
least for certain regions, Alabama and Florida. They all are
using water that is coming from come downstream from US. Yeah,
(36:24):
from the Chattahoochee actually, and Alabama and Florida often are
um competing for those resources along with Georgia. So if
Georgia decides to do something on a state level that's
going to affect that water source, it impacts these other states,
and you get this kind of tension. This is within
one country where yeah, yeah, and internationally it can get
(36:48):
pretty messy. I just just for example, most of Iraq's
water supply originates and rivers in Turkey, which means that
for for Iraq to get the water that it needs,
conservation efforts have to begin in a whole other country
that they might not be agreeing with very much at
the time. Right. So if you have one country that says,
you know, well, we'll conserve as much as we need
to for our needs, but why should we be considered,
(37:08):
and why should we worry about your needs you're you
don't you're not part of our country. That's sticky, that's
that's you know. I mean obviously it raises up very
tricky ethical questions, and you know, you may not be
at all uh able to affect those the answers to
those questions if you aren't in that particular country. So
you know, it does get pretty sticky. I will say, Yeah,
(37:32):
there's there's a whole bunch of different problems that that
really go on with uh, with with water and how
we're going to kind of bring these old methods of
getting it places and treating it into the future because
you know, we're the population is growing. We're certainly not
going to have less need for water anytime soon. Yeah,
(37:53):
so some things that we can look into or things
like using uh different approaches for agriculture, which would obviously
put less of a demand on our water use. If
we're using fresh water for agriculture, and we can come
up with plants that either need less water, or we
come up with farming techniques that don't use as much water.
(38:13):
Because I mean, there there are other byproducts to this too, Right,
If you have an enormous field that is treated with
various types of herbicides, pesticides, that kind of thing, and
you're using massive amounts of water to distribute those you
get run off of all those chemicals that can then
enter the local water table and that can be a
big problem. So, I mean you can see that this
(38:34):
is not a simple system. It's very complex. Absolutely. And
and also according to the e P, a um of
water treated by water systems is lost to leaks um
in some systems that can be as much as six
The worldwide average is about twenty and and that's you know,
that's a huge amount. All right, So let's talk a
(38:56):
little bit. And you know, we've talked about the challenges
in the state of the art as it is today,
but there are people who are working on some pretty
cool stuff that could in theory really revolutionized water systems. Right. Oh, absolutely, Um,
some of some of the more some of the more
down to earth. I'll cover those first methods. Some some
researchers are talking about the simple act of diverting watershed
(39:18):
of the physical area of land from which you would
get your water. Right because because classically your your watershed
is far away from a city, basically, um, nothing to
do with your cities. But in in these are modern times,
we've got so many more people living in urban areas
and um, so much wasted water coming down in rainfall
(39:38):
on these large urban areas that if we if we
look at at just increasing the system capacity of cities
to deal with that water by by replacing concrete with
porous pavement, by adding more plant life to cities, by
restoring wetlands, or or installing rain barrels and other building
gray water management systems, right, Yeah, gray water is one
(40:00):
of those things that can be incredibly useful for particular applications.
I mean, obviously it's not something that you would necessarily say,
let's hook this up to yeah, and then I'll drink
and then I'll drink, or a bubbler if you prefer. Yeah,
gray water being um, the the basically clean wastewater that
comes from mild householder or commercial applications. Right, And there's
(40:22):
plenty of different uses we could put that to rather
than using I mean, it really does water alan Absolutely,
it's really crazy to think that we have incredibly fresh
water in our toilets. Yeah, that's that's one of those
things that drives me completely. Just when you think that
there are two billion people in Asia who do not
have access to clean water, and we're using drinking water
(40:44):
in our toilets. Yeah, so see, using gray water in
a system like that could end up meaning that that
water could be used in other applications. Obviously, the big
problem with the two billion people in Asia is that
they don't have the systems in place or the resources
available to them. It's not just that the Earth has
an x amount of fresh water that's evenly distributed across
(41:05):
the entire planet, like we're saying, yeah, and you know,
it's it's not the kind of thing where you know,
if if you if you avoid flushing your toilet, that's
not going to give water to the poor kids in China,
like like it's yeah, it's like we said, it's a
little more complicated than that. Okay, so that makes sense. Yeah,
And in some communities are already doing a whole lot
for that. We mentioned in in that in that listener
mail from Valerie, she she had mentioned Las Vegas systems
(41:28):
and they are using a lot of water reclamation in
order to to to stretch the water as far as
it will go because they're kind of in a desert. Yeah,
not one of those areas where they've got, you know,
huge reservoirs that are naturally occurring nearby. It's a little
tricky and I don't know if you know this, but
Las Vegas is kind of a big city. It's got
(41:48):
a few people, a few people in it. I'll be
there soon enough for ce. Yes, that's right, that's coming up.
It's kind of exciting. Also, currently happening lots of new
technology in recycling, purification, and desalination. Yeah, we we've seen
things like the water reclamation technology that NASA has pioneered
(42:09):
has been amazing. Like if you look at the stuff
they have on the International Space Station. And it's not
just NASA, obviously, there are other space organizations, European space organizations, uh,
Russian space organizations that have all contributed to this kind
of body of science and technology. But they really make
water go as far as it possibly can with the
(42:29):
cost of what dollars for a pound of stuff to
send into space, right, you know, every every ounce counts. Yeah,
you don't wanna, you don't want to be constantly they're
thirsty again, gotta lug up another hundred pounds of water
go to the bank. No, it's it's you know, they
have systems that recapture water from everything from the water
(42:51):
vapor and their breath, the sweat, urine, things like that.
You know, not all this water necessarily goes right back
into drinking water either, but it's necessary for the system.
So we can learn from that and use those same
sort of technologies and various applications here on Earth, not
all of them. Obviously. We're not gonna have giant water
vapor uh condensers out there capturing everyone's breath, but probably
(43:15):
probably not in most buildings. Um but I would I
don't know, we might get one in here someday, but
if we could, that would be that would be terrible
and lovely. I feel like Robert would love a love
an art project about that. Um but but yeah, there's
there's lots of really interesting materials and membrane sciences, different
electrical properties of different things. We talked about that a
(43:37):
bunch in our forward thinking episode of desalination, which is
of course, and I mean that is a nice solution
to getting drinking water when you don't have any fresh
water in your Yeah, and there we've also seen some
cool filtration systems that can be used to purify water.
If you have access to water but it's not pure,
(43:58):
you can run it through these things. Dean Cayman worked
on one. I know that Bill Gates is really behind
technologies that are being developed for developing nations that may
have problems getting clean water, and you just you pour
this stuff in on one end and again gravity pulls
the water through the various systems until at the end
(44:21):
of it you get potable drinking water, which is pretty
phenomenal stuff. Now, these are are small, They're meant for
small communities. They're not you know, something that's going to
support an enormous city, and you might need multiple units
depending upon how large the population of that area is.
But it's really promising. But but Lauren, I want to
know about a crazy kind of science fiction e E E
(44:42):
approach to totally renovating the water system. Get anything for me?
I do. In fact, um, have have you heard of
four D printing? Oh? My gosh, four deep printing. I
remember seeing a devastatingly handsome bald Man talk about that
on a video not to long ago. He's kind of narcissistic, though,
(45:03):
I don't know. It's okay, it's okay. When you look
that good, it's completely justified. There there was an episode,
there's another separate episode of forward Thinking that was all
about forty printing and and this is kind of a
kitchy catchphrase, um, but it's we're talking about self assembly really.
Um So, So okay, M I T has a self
assembly lab that's being run by one Skylar Tippets. Great name,
(45:26):
it is a great name. Um he's he's an architect
and and comps I and artist kind of dude. And
um in in M I t S word, self assembly
is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered
structure through local interaction. And so what they're really interested
in here is is using material science and biological science
to create mostly analog devices that can react to changing situations. Right, So,
(45:51):
and and usually it means that you're adding some form
of energy or introducing some new element to this material,
which will then undergo a change in shape or form. Right.
This is a really proof of concept kind of stage.
Right now, they're there at this at this very basic
like they've built a long tube that, when dropped in
water well morph to form the letters M I T. Yeah,
(46:12):
And they had they had one flat piece of it
looks like just plastic, but when you put water on it,
it would form itself into a cube. Um. Yes, you
know you could watch the video and then you see
that it's sped up by about eight times, and you
realize this is a gradual process. It's really slow. I
mean all of this is thanks to a multi material
(46:34):
form of three D printing. Um. And the four D
in in the fourth dimension and in the four D
title is time. Um. But but but so so multi
material three D printing. Since different materials can have different
water absorption properties, Um, you know you can. You can
build them so that they will squish up in different ways. Right,
You've got you've got an interesting approach where you've got
(46:57):
this material that can actually react to changing such a waans.
So if you engineer it so that it behaves a
particular way under a particular se circumstances, there are a
lot of applications that you could put this to, including
completely revolutionizing a water system. Yeah. I mean, you know,
anything is huge as as a water system is a
really long way off from from a cute little tube
(47:19):
that spells out a cute little thing over of course
of several minutes. Um. But but you know, imagine a
pipe that changes shape to accommodate spikes in in in
watershed or water waste or frozen water. Right. Soe now
this would be amazing because, like we had said over
and over again, the water systems we have have formed
over several decades, and they're not uniform at all, and
(47:41):
they you know, some of the pipes are different sizes
than other pipes, and you know, you might have it
where certain parts of a city may have trouble meeting
the water needs of that particular part of the city
compared to others just because the infrastructure doesn't really support
it anymore. If you had pipes that could adjust to
the right to the to the level of demand, then
(48:02):
if the population fluctuated, if it went, you know, got
bigger or smaller, the pipes themselves, in theory, could end
up adjusting themselves to meet whatever the new demand was
to create the optimum water pressure for the amount of
people that it needed to serve um Or what about
a pipe that could shift itself to self repair damage.
(48:23):
And even more freaky than that, which is already amazing,
the idea of you don't have to worry so much
about maintenance because the pipes maintain themselves. They won't really
break because they can just move bits around. It's another
thing that I think is amazing is this idea of
an undulating pipe. Now this is way off into science
fiction future, right, absolutely, but but the the idea of
(48:44):
this is that the pipe can undulate to push water
through itself. So in other words, you don't need pumping stations.
You don't even need to worry about gravity anymore. You've
got pipes that can change their shape and propel the
water through them, providing the water pressure you need. And
it's all built into of the material itself. You don't
have any electronic parts, you don't have any generators. Yeah,
(49:05):
it's just doing it on its own because of the
way that it was constructed. And that's really what I
find phenomenal. It's not like there's some tiny electronic component
inside this stuff. No, it's literally the way it was built. Yeah,
and just because it was built this way, it will
react you know, in X way when why happens because
(49:29):
in some cases it's things like kinetic energy, right, Like
if you know, you might have a sheet of this
stuff and if you throw it on the ground, it
turns into a chair over the course of like minutes.
But anyway, I think the connect ones are a little
bit quicker. Yeah they can be. Yeah, but that would
be you know, that's the kind of stuff we're talking
about now. Granted again this is sci fi science stuff.
(49:51):
Does have a really great Ted talk that will link to.
But but you'll see in this Ted talk he presents
a couple examples of what they're doing right at this
very moment, and it is much less impressive than we've
just made it sound, um, but the potential assuming that
we can get it to work. So I'm really looking
forward to seeing what what what people wind up doing
(50:11):
with that. Yeah, I'm sure we're only you know, thirty
to fifty years away, right right around the same time
that we hit the singularity and right around the time
you know, singularity robot uprising and undulating pipes. They're all
going to come on a Tuesday, So we'll be recording
forward thinking, assuming we're all still around at that point.
I mean, I got no plans. So anyway, this was
one of those topics I thought was really interesting. You know,
(50:33):
it had a historical element to it that was fun
to talk about. It has a real impact on us today,
right now, and the promise of technology in the future
has at least the potential to make it a phenomenally
interesting uh system that we could see, you know, in
a few decades. Assuming that that this is everything's working out.
(50:53):
Obviously it's a lot of work that we're talking about here,
but sure even just just just big data and monitoring techniques. Um,
getting everyone to work kind of together on this problem. UM,
I think is going to be huge satellite data to
to watch stuff. I mean, satellites can can detect changes
in gravity that therefore detect changes in groundwater concentration. That's
(51:15):
pretty incredible. Um. I didn't detect any changes in gravity,
but I only saw the film once, so I have
to see it at least one more time before I
could tell you what it changed. So, if you guys
have anything to to say to us about this or
other topics, why don't you write to us our email
addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com or drop us
a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. You can find
(51:36):
us with the handle of text Stuff H. S. W
and Lauren and I will talk to you again really
soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it has to work dot com
Get in test with technology with text stuff from how
stuff dot com. Hey there, every one, welcome to text Stuff.
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren voc Obama, and today's
episode comes to you courtesy of a little listener mail
(00:25):
that's going old school, Lauren, and we don't have the
clacks and necessarily, unless Noel decides to get super creative
with this one, I'm looking over. He's giving me nothing
back put in a very quiet clack, maybe a gentle
Long time listeners know what I'm talking about. You guys
who joined fairly recently, let's just say we spared you.
But anyway, this listener mail actually came from Valerie, who
(00:48):
sent us an email and said, I would like to
suggest an episode on city water systems. I think how
different countries are creating a fish and water systems, and
also the system that's used in Las Vegas could be
interesting for a podcast. So many both so little potable water,
what is in our future? And we agree this would
be an awesome episode. So we suggested it to other people,
but they said we should do it. Yeah weird, Actually,
(01:12):
I I guess we we We have talked about this
a tiny bit over on forward thinking, which is a
thing that I think we've been saying a lot lately
on the show. Yeah. Yeah, And the Forward Thinking episodes
are in a lot of ways very closely related to
tech stuff because we're looking into the future now. Not
all of Forward Thinking's topics are technology topics. Some of
(01:32):
them are social or cultural or have our more science
oriented than tech oriented. But if you enjoy the show,
chances are you to enjoy that show too, especially since
two of the three hosts of that show are this show.
So just saying well, well, we'll let you do the
math on that one. Um. But yeah, So, so we
wanted to do this episode on the infrastructure systems that
(01:55):
exist today and historically and some of the things that
we are thinking about for that incredible and slightly terrifying future. Right, So,
first of all, let's talk about why is it challenging
to get clean water? Um? Lots of reasons, Lots lots
of reasons. Rain doesn't fall everywhere all the time that
(02:15):
people want to live. Um. Rivers don't flow everywhere all
the time people want to live. Sometimes river courses can
change over time. Yeah, Um, the climate is kind of changing.
That's that's a thing. That's happening. Um. And basically, even
though it's really expensive to create an upgrade infrastructure, UM,
(02:37):
it's way more expensive to repair damage caused by failed
infrastructure and or to just not let people have water. Um.
We don't last all that long without that stuff. So
when we get a little further into this episode, you're
going to realize, like, you know, some of the some
of the systems out there are a little little on
the elderly side. Yeah, and really, not not upgrading your
(02:59):
infrast structure is like playing chicken with entropy, because systems
break down, they do. And if you yeah, yeah, exactly,
and some of these systems look like it's, you know,
just a true mishmash because you know, as we know,
cities grow over time, some of them don't, some of
them decrease in size, but in general you see population
growth the change exactly. So and even if they do decrease,
(03:22):
that's another thing that you have to you have to
adjust for. Yeah, So you get you get all these
different types of add ons to existing infrastructure. That means
that not everything is the same. You might have, uh,
you know, four or five different generations of pipes in
one city's infrastructure, and you know, the more complexity you add,
(03:43):
the more likely something somewhere along the line is not
going to work the way you had anticipated. In other words,
stuff's gonna break and then you gotta fix it. But
let's let's take a look back, way back. Yeah, because
a lot of the basic principles upon which we have
based in our most modern systems on go back to
how far Roman times really? Yeah, so the Romans. You
(04:06):
may have heard about the Roman aqueducts and you might think, uh,
is that a hockey team. No, it's not that hockey team. Yeah,
I would too, centurions on on skates would be awesome.
But uh so the aqueducts were a system of channels
waterways that would bring water from distant places to Rome
(04:28):
because Rome was a city that was growing much too
large to be supplied by the local water sources. And
mostly the most famous aqueducts are the ones that you see.
They look like bridges from a distance. They're elevated. They're
built on these these stone columns, but they are not
bridges for road travel. They're actually water bridges. They allow
(04:49):
water to flow, and the reason why they're elevated is
because in order to make a pathway from the water
source the reservoirs that the Romans were using. It sometimes
meant that they had to cross things like valleys. Well,
it's really easy to go down a valley if you've
got water. It's hard to make the water go back
up the other side of the valley, right. It would
have to be going pretty fast because the way that
gravity works, and most most of the time things want
(05:11):
to go downwards and not upward. You would just have
created a river in that valley as opposed to making
the water go across. So by doing this aqueduct, if
you could have a kind of continuous grade so that
it was always going a little lower in elevation than
the earlier sections, you could induce water to flow. You're
(05:33):
letting gravity do the work for you. So the Roman
system had all these aqueducts, and most of them were
actually channels that were cut underneath the ground. Uh there
there are quite a few aqueducts that you can see
that are built up in their amazing feats of engineering.
But I think even more amazing to me anyway, as
(05:53):
the thought of all these under yeah, these channels that
have been cut into the living rock so that water
can flow through it. Um, and so the water would
flow all the way toward Rome, and then they would
direct it into giant cisterns, which are just enormous containers, right,
a big old container that can hold water. And these
cisterns would be in the tallest areas around Rome where
(06:17):
the water could still flow into, right, and then a
network of I believe they were using lead pipes at
the time, which was turned out to be problematic. They
were a little blind to the problems at the time.
Um when I would direct the water from from those
cisterns into into homes and fountains and other buildings, yep,
they would they would run these pipes down through the
(06:39):
various parts of Rome so that you could get access
to clean water easily, so you wouldn't have to trek
far like you know, because before this kind of system,
the basic way you got water was you walked to
the closest source of water, took you and you went
to some water yep, whether that was a river or
a lake or a well know, something like that, and
(07:01):
then you would bring that back and when you were
out you had to go back out again. This was
trying to make that much more accessible now. In total,
they're about two hundred sixty miles worth of aqueducts around
the city of Rome, which is pretty phenomenal. Bad for
a few thousand years ago. Yeah, and uh, they know
it was a pretty effective system. They let the gravity
(07:23):
do the work for them. They didn't have to build
uh lots of pumping stations, although they did have some,
but they didn't have to have as many as you
would think they'd need because they were latying. Gravity do
most of the work for them. Uh. And in fact,
that basic idea of letting gravity do a lot of
the work for you still applies today. Oh yeah, I've
(07:45):
been in buildings in New York where that's basically how
the water pressure works. They've got a water tower on
top of the building, and depending on on what level
you're on, you get better pressure because of how far
it's falling. My favorite is when you use the sinks
in this building and occasionally you get the sputtering noise
where it sounds like a a giant ball of cobras
(08:07):
is just on the other side of the faucet. Um.
You must use the specialist think I don't actually get
I'd show you, but you can't go into that room.
So let's talk about a couple of other pre industrial
civilizations besides the Romans, because you'd think, well, were they
the only ones who came up with this idea, And
the answer to that is no, No. Other other civilizations
(08:28):
knew that gravity worked. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't necessarily know
the mechanism of it or what it was, but they
knew that, hey, if you drop something, it falls, and
that if you if you look at water, it runs downhill,
not uphill. So you know, drawing those conclusions, you figure
out that you need to get water to this place
where a lot of people live, because it turns out
we need water. London was one of these places. London
(08:51):
built what is called the Great Conduit, which was another
massive channel that uh that brought water in to London,
actually to cheapside, two cisterns and cheapside that were then
hooked up to other cisterns around the city. And if
you were rich, you could afford to pay to have
pipes brought into your home so that you would have
(09:13):
running water in your home. If you weren't rich, sometimes
you would try and tap into a neighbor's pipes, which
could get you arrested or stealing water. Yeah, I imagine
that that also must with the system in ways that
made nobody happy. Yeah, you know, nothing like having an
enormous leak appearing where you did not expect one to um.
(09:35):
But yeah, that this was something that London started working
on in the in the thirteenth century. In the mid
twelve hundreds, I heard that Constantinople, Constantinople not stand bull.
Why they changed it, I can't say, but Constantinople also yeah,
they created a man made river, so again kind of
like the aqueduct system of Rome, but more of a
(09:58):
river than an aqueduct um. And it was allowed to
carry water both above and below ground. They had sections
where again it was they had cut channels into the
ground and the water would flow through there, and it
was carrying water from about two fifty kilometers away from
the city. Like the water source for the city was
(10:20):
two kilometers away. Now, when you look at this, like
when you look at most cities, like you look at
the if you look at a map of ancient civilizations,
for example, and you look at where the cities are located,
they're usually right around water sources, fresh water sources. Because
that was the most effective way of doing it. Yeah, so, uh,
(10:40):
you know, it's it's only fairly recently that we've gotten
to a point where if you live really far away
from fresh water sources, you can build a large city.
We've had smaller you know, smaller uh, towns and villages
and populations, nomadic tribes, things like that, that we're able
to exist on smaller sources of fresh water. But obviously,
(11:03):
if you if you want to have a city of
any size, you need access to a lot of water,
all right, And this can this can be a very
large problem. For for example, Singapore up until very recently
had to basically import all of their water from Malaysia.
And uh yeah, it's it's ended up springing up a
whole industry that I'm going to talk about in another
few minutes here. But um so it's so okay, um
(11:26):
in terms of in terms of our modern water infrastructure,
if you want to, you want to talk about that
a little bit. You're you're tired of the ancient world.
I understand, Lauren. I understand you don't want to dwell
in the past. I couldn't agree more, mostly because my
notes are out. I'm done with all the ancient stuff.
I don't have any other cities that can talk about, Lauren.
So I am ready to move into the future with
(11:47):
you boldly, yes and forcibly, where no man has gone before.
No one. Sorry, sorry forgot about the next generation an
old school. A lot lots of people are in the
these are modern times. That's not not like no one
has ever been here. We're here, that's true. Okay, So
let's talk about your your basic modern water system. It's
(12:07):
not that different in the sense that most of them
tend to still rely heavily on gravity. Note pun intended.
I didn't realize I was making one until I was done.
Uh not, not all of them do. Some water systems
use uh electric pumps and will just pump the water
to maintain the right kind of water pressure for their populations.
(12:28):
But more frequently than not, you're gonna see water towers,
particularly things like small towns. You'll you'll usually see as
you're going around the outskirts, you see that enormous tower
and you think, wow, you know, what is the point
of that? Why do you have this big tower just
holding water there? And if you're in a city, like
you said, Lauren, you might see on the rooftops, different
(12:50):
individual water towers. Yeah, so what is going on here, Well,
it's the same principle. You put the water at an
elevated location, and by that elevate location, the weight of
the water is providing the pressure you need to provide
the However, many households that water tower serves or businesses
or whatever, um with the right amount of water pressure
(13:12):
so that when you turn on the faucet water comes out. Now. Um,
your basic water tower is able to hold somewhere between
I don't know, twoe or fifty thousand gallons of water
to maybe five hundred thousand or more gallons of water
at it at a time, so big capacity. Can keep
in mind that your average swimming pool holds fifteen to
(13:33):
twenty thousand gallons of water, so working more water than
pretty big, not small, big lots of water and um
usually they are attached to some sort of well always
are attached to some sort of pumping station which can
pump water back up into the tower as well as
usually provide direct pressure to the community. So the way
(13:55):
this tends to work is one of two ways. You
can either pump all the water up into the water
tower until it reaches a certain level and then you
just stop. You turn the pump off. That way, you
can serve energy. That way, the gravity will pull the
water down, and for every foot that that water is elevated,
you get point four three pounds per square inch of pressure.
(14:16):
Most cities have between fifty and a hundred p s I.
So your water tower's height is going to determine what
that water pressure is. So you've got the pump turned
off the waters in the tower. When you, Lauren, decide
you want to have a tasty drink of water and
you turn on the faucet, then that allows the water
from that water tower to come down a little bit.
It's pushing all the water through the pipes. You get
(14:37):
water through your faucet. Everyone's happy, yea, assuming that all
the infrastructure is working properly, right, yes, So that is
that is the general assumption if the water comes on. Now, Lauren,
let's say that you decide you want a glass of
water at the same time as everyone else in town
has decided to take showers, flush the toilet, you know,
turn the faucet on outside for no reason whatsoeb or
(15:00):
water the lawn, wash, the car, et cetera. It's enough
so that the water in the water tower has gone
down to a level where it is no longer able
to supply that pressure. That's where the pump kicks in.
The pump is able to continuously supply more water, so
it's reaching the right pressure. It also, when people start
to calm down and decide they're not going to waste
(15:21):
so much water anymore, or drink it or whatever, it
can start to refill that water tower until it reaches
the optimum level. Again. Now, there are other systems where
the water tower is essentially a reserve unit. So the
water pump is taking water from a reservoir. Could be
a lake, it could be a river, it could just
be an artificial reservoir. It's taking water from that reservoir
(15:42):
and pumping it directly to the homes. And then any
time that the demand outstrips the capacity of the water pump,
the water tower is activated and supplements it. So either
way you have kind of the symbiotic relationship between the
pump and the tower. Now with the tower, the nice
thing is, because of gravity, you don't have to add
extra energy into the system to get the water to
(16:03):
where it needs to go. You don't have to have
all these pumping stations along the lines to keep the
pressure at the right level. So, you know, we think
about that for things like telephone lines. When we talked
about the telephone system, how they had to have relay
stations so that they could boost the signal throughout. The
same sort of thing with water pressure. Right if eventually,
if you're talking about it long enough, uh pathway that
(16:24):
pressure starts, you're going to lose motion resistance along the
path and you've got yeah, and you've just got too
much space to fill. So um, these are ways of
getting around that. So and with the gravity working for you,
you have to spend less energy overall. Pumping the water
up into the tower is more energy efficient because you're
(16:46):
just filling it up to where it needs to be
and then you stop, as opposed to consistently pumping water
to the entire population. So in general, that's how your
basic water tower works. Uh, it's pretty neat stuff. Actually,
I mean, I know it's it's a really simple system,
but I mean, but that's why it's so elegant. Of course,
(17:07):
that's not how everyone gets their water, bob. Right, When
you're further out from cities, you you're gonna either need
your own well or um which you are probably going
to need to use a pump in order to access. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So I mean, granted, you could think about the well
pumps there are, you know, the old style pump handle
where you're literally pumping, but more frequently we have electronic pumps. Now. Yeah.
(17:32):
Here in the U. S Alone, we've got some sixteen
million private wells, and we drill another five hundred thousand
every year. Yeah. And uh so if you live outside
of the city, um, which I used to. You know,
I used to live out pretty far out there, then
you may be using here in Atlanta, living like five
miles from downtown is considered a little bit outside the city.
(17:54):
But I'm sure I live in the city now, I'm
within the city limits. So yeah, no, no, you know,
actually outside where you can see the stars and stuff
like that, and cols and and bison occasionally, um, which
we're totally domesticated. We don't have wild bison in Georgia
as far as I know. Anyway, if you live out
in the in the sticks, as I would say, which
(18:17):
I used to, then you might have your own well,
or you might have a communal well of some sort.
But the way this works is you end up digging down.
See there's this thing called the water table that exists
underground and it's pretty much everywhere more or less. But
you have to dig at different depths depending upon where
you are right, depending on on how much rainfall a
(18:40):
location gets, and um the other runoff that kind of stuff,
and you know, lots of things will determine exactly how
far down you would need to go, and also the
quality of the water. We'll talk about that in a
second too. But if you happen to live someplace that
has good aquifers, like freshwater aquifers that are at the
you can access at the water table, you can dig
a hole and then eventually you know you should hit water.
(19:02):
And so for example, a shallow well might be or
or less down and with that you could use what's
called a jet pump. What is it jet pump too?
So jet pump, Well, it does is it pumps water?
But the way it does is kind of cool. You're welcome, Yeah,
So yeah, it uses electricity and it uses a little
(19:24):
bit of water that you already put into the pump.
It's called to prime the primate. It's drive water is
what's called. So it's got a little jet, a little
think of it like a nozzle that you would put
on the end of a hose. And you know, by
reducing the size of the pathway that the water can
go through, you also increase the pressure. You put a
little water in it to primate. You turn it on,
(19:46):
it starts to emit this water at high pressure. It
starts to create a vacuum, right due to the jet
of water flowing out, it creating suction inside the tube, right,
and the tube goes down into the well until it
hits where the water is actually goes further down than
that obviously, but then the water gets drawn up the
tube through that vacuum, yep, and then it gets sent
(20:08):
into a holding tank of some sort. So this isn't
you know. The wells that are being used are not
something that you know. When you turn on the faucet,
the well kicks in and then you have to wait
a while and the water comes out. The pump continues
to work until the water tank reaches its optimum level
and it turns off and then we'll come back on
when it when the water is depleted a certain amount,
(20:29):
so that you've kind of got your own little personal
mini water tower. Yeah. And since since you're not necessarily
using gravity, I mean you probably don't have your water
tank forty feet above your house. Probably not, Yeah, So
since you probably don't have that one, it uses instead
in order to create the right amount of pressure that
you're gonna need for your water. Um. They have uh
(20:51):
an air bladder that's inside the water tank, so it's
inflated and as you put water in, it compresses that bladder,
the bladders pushing against the wall water. Um. And then
once the water has hit the right level, and when
you turn on the faucet, the bladder is pressing against
the water, the water comes out the right pressure until
the bladder has you know, extended about as far as
it can. Then the water tank needs to be refilled
(21:12):
by the pump. So that that's your basic system, although
there are other ones too. If you have a if
the water table is deeper than a jet pump may
not be strong enough to create the vacuum necessary to
pull the water up that height. Because the higher you go,
the heavier that you know, the more the more energy need,
the more more exactly, the more work you have to do,
(21:33):
and so you might have something called a double drop
jet pump or even a submersible pump, where the pump
itself is under the water as opposed to at the
top of the well. And in this case you would
just have another kind of approach to drawing water up
this very long tube and again filling up a tank,
(21:53):
just as you would with the jet pump. So those
are the other ways of getting water, uh, you know,
the basic ways that you would see in today's world,
at least in the United States, right right, And well,
you know, a lot of this technology and a lot
of our infrastructure really has has been in place for
(22:13):
for over a hundred years. UM. A lot of our
water towers, UM distribution lines, sewer lines, storage facilities, and
stuff like that were built, uh, basically immediately following World
War Two. So I mean, so all of this is
is pretty simple. I mean, personal pumps have have developed
a little bit and changed a little bit in the
following decades, but but this technology has has not changed
(22:37):
in a long time. And what we're saying, and yet
we've added lots of stuff to it. So this is
where I'm talking about. How you know, the pipes that
were used forty years ago are made of different stuff
and are of different sizes, and the pipes that were
used thirty years ago which are different from twenty, which
are different from ten, which are different from today. So
you've got this system where nothing is homogeneous at all,
(22:58):
and and there, and the lifespans of all of these
different products can can depend a lot on the materials
that they were made from and how how carefully they
were installed. Not to mention the environment itself. If you
are in a place like uh, the Great White North
shout out to all of our Canadian fans, a uh,
then you know they have to withstand much colder temperatures
(23:19):
than say, down here in Hot Lanta. I hate myself
for saying, and I didn't even notice for half a second,
which makes me hate myself more. Well, um, yeah, okay,
So so in that's that's in the US and other
parts of the world. I mean, we get we get
not um not by global standards, a whole lot of
(23:40):
water per capita here, but we we certainly get a
lot more than many other places do. Yeah, and there
are other places that have to get a lot more
creative with how they manage water, how they get water,
and how they distribute it. So for example, um, well,
you know, I could talk about Abu Dhabi really quickly.
So now Abu Dhabi is is a the that are
(24:00):
the the area of Abu Dhabi is so large and
so populous, it could not have supported that population, uh
like a century ago because the water management system just
wasn't there. The area around Abu Dhabi has only two
freshwater aquifers. All the other aquifers are salty, that's it's
like seawater, and that there's no fresh water otherwise to access.
(24:24):
So they do have wells that they've um drilled down
so that they can pull up some of the water
from the freshwater aquifers, but that's almost exclusively used in agriculture.
Usually almost seventy of fresh water of any given community
is going to be used for agriculture, right, So in
this case, what they've decided to do in order to
(24:45):
supply the population with freshwater is built a lot of
desalination plants, and we've talked about those in a previous
episode of tech Stuff. Go back and search if you
want to look at our discussion. We actually got to
speak with an expert about the salination plants and how
they're are different methods of removing salt from seawater so
you can make it drinkable. Um So that was a
creative way that they have used to meet the needs
(25:08):
of their population. Right. And you know, most of the
United States uh water infrastructure was was built up in
the midst of the industrial era, when everyone is starting
to move from urban areas or move i'm sorry, from
from rural areas to urban areas. And those kind of
population shifts that we saw in the early to mid
twentieth century are just happening now in a lot of
(25:30):
developing countries. So the Third World Center, for for example,
estimates that there's two billion people without access to safe
drinking water in Asia alone. That's yeah, it really just
just depends on on your your rainfall, your river, access,
your groundwater, all all of those natural resources. Um and
and for for another example, um Iceland. Okay, let's let's
(25:54):
if you're talking about the cubic meters of fresh water
per capita, per per per person in a country. Um
Iland has about five three thousand cubic meters of water
freshwater per capita. Okay, Bow rain for example, has three disparity,
not three thousand, just just three. That's Yeah, so obviously
(26:16):
you have to get creative with the way that you
are able to access and distribute water, right. And then
after you have accessed and distributed that water, Um, you know,
most people use water to do some stuff and then
they want it to sort of go away, right, So
we need to talk about how to reclaim that water
and what you do with that water once you've used it.
(26:37):
You know what, I got a great idea. Yeah, let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor and we'll
come back and talk about that. Excellent alright, So just
before the break, lawn, you brought up a great point.
You know, we don't just use water to drink. Obviously,
we use it for all these other sorts of things,
whether it's taking a shower or washing dishes or in
the toilets. There are a lot of different ways we
use it. We might use it to water our lawns.
(26:58):
And then once we use it, what do we What
happens then? I mean, it goes down the drain for
most of these cases, apart from the water in the
lawn example, but you know it goes down the drain.
What happens then? Well? Okay, so so following this entire
gravity model. Um, most of the time waste water waste
facilities are going to be located in some kind of
(27:20):
low lying area. Yeah yeah, and it makes sense again
because that means you let the gravity pull the water
where it needs to go, so you don't have to
have pumping stations to keep wastewater going, because then you're
spending energy just to get rid of wastewater. So yeah,
you've got you know, the drain systems, whether they're on
the roads or whether they're in the uh there in
(27:40):
your house whatever, These all kind of lead to a
water treatment facility. You've got pipes, you've got sewer tunnels,
all that fun stuff. You've got the manholes that allow
people to have access in case they need to to
do maintenance on any of this system. And it's really good,
by the way, to have these treatment facilities instead of
just dumping waste water into into natural rivers, for example,
(28:04):
because that will therefore, um, you know, allow you to
not totally pollute your natural rivers, right, and also not
give a terrible statement to anyone who lives down river
of you, right exactly have fun drinking stupid. Yeah, that's
not a great message. Okay, So so the basic the
(28:25):
basic format of a water treatment facility. All right, so
um this all right, guys, you know I'm going to
give you the straight poop on this. There's gonna be
some potty talk here and uh, you know it's something
that we need to know about. All right. First, you
got a screen. Okay, Once you get to the water
treatment facility, you have you have different levels of water
(28:46):
purification depending upon the sophistication of the facility. Sure that
this will occur in several steps. The first is a
physical step where where you are just just literally screens
to take solid waste out of your water as much
of the solid wastes as you can. Now, these screens
aren't aren't incredibly fine so that they take out all
particulate matter, but they get a lot of it, a
(29:06):
lot of the larger solids. Uh. Now, the water that
is left from that first screening process moves into ponds
or pools, and then it's allowed to sit there for
a while so that sediments in the waters start to
settle into the bottom of that pool. You then end
up removing that waste that tends to be about half
(29:27):
of all the waste that's in that water at that moment,
So it's still there's still quite a bit suspended within
the water itself. But to get rid of about half
of it that way, Uh, that's waste you will then
dispose of either by putting in a landfill or maybe
in an incinerator. I keep hoping for these plasma generators
so that you could use it because any organic matter
you could turn into sin gas, which synthetic gas that
(29:50):
would actually be a fuel. But mr mr fusion make
it go. We're still not there yet. So uh, so
you've gotten rid of about fifty of the waste, that
means you still got fifty percent left in the water. Uh.
You then allow that water to be treated with various chemicals,
mainly chlorine, which is used to kill off a lot
of harmful bacteria. All right, for your for your very
(30:11):
basic water treatment, you can then treat it with chemicals
to get rid of um, anything really nasty that's still
living in there. Yeah, you might use a little bacteria
first to eat up any organic matter, and then use
the chlorine to kill off everything. But then at that
point you essentially discharge it. Assuming that it's a simple
water treatment plant. But there are more sophisty ones that
have more steps. Would you like to know about the
(30:31):
other steps? Sure? I think that they involve more bacteria,
don't they do? You start off with some errated tanks
that hold the water and the bacteria, and that those
bacteria end up consuming almost all of the waste inside
that water in fact around it. And that's that's it's
really cool to me that they that they use gross
stuff to eat the gross stuff they don't want. And
(30:52):
then um, but but but but then you need to
get rid of that first gross stuff, right, Yeah, You
move the water over into settling tanks, and then you
remove that bacteria. You can treat the water again with
chemicals to do that, uh, And by this time you
are down to just uh, like of all the waste
that you had had in that water to start with.
(31:13):
Then you can treat it with other chemicals or remove
stuff like nitrogen and phosphorus which tend to build up,
use the chlorine to kill off any of the remaining bacteria,
and then you discharge the water into whatever. You know.
Usually it ends up going through some canal systems and
into another river eventually, but at this point it's, uh,
it's you know, clean water. I don't know that you
(31:34):
would necessarily want to stand at the end of it
with a glass and say yum yum. But maybe maybe not.
But but it's at least, you know, okay for being
released into the environment relatively as waste water goes. And
and to be fair, I mean, there's I want to
address this because it's just one of those things that
occurred to me. I don't mean to suggest that water
it can hold on to certain attributes just because it
came into contact with something, because that's not the case.
(31:57):
I mean really, technically, we're all we're all running around
drinking dino blood, right. Yeah, So that's your basic approach
is essentially going through this multi step process to remove waste.
And and by basic, we mean this is actually very complex,
very expensive to build these facilities and uh and the
result of of decades of research. There's filtering technique. There's
(32:18):
actually if you want to see a more detailed approach
to how this is done in a real system, there's
a fun little documentary that's on YouTube. It's before Fawcett,
after flush I believe his West. Yeah, yeah, you were
talking about that. It's about the Chicago water system, which
is phenomenal. They have like, at least at the time
of the documentary, they had the world's largest water treatment
(32:41):
facility and they get their their water from the Great
Lake and uh, it's interesting. They have all these tunnels
that are underneath the lake that allow lake water to
go through. And it's a really cool documentary. It's like
seven minutes long. So we'll link to it because, um
if you want to see more of a step by
step process and kind of see animations of what is
(33:02):
going on the stuff that I just described, it has
all of that. It's really good. But but yeah, you know,
so not not everywhere in the world has these these
wonderful treatment facilities and um and it can be a
huge problem for the spread of diseases. Um Uh. Like
remember how I said there's estimates of two billion people
in Asia without safe drinking water. There's an estimated additional
(33:25):
three billion there without safe sanitation and water waste management. Right, So,
on top of the fact that there are billions of
people who don't have access to an adequate water or
waste management system, there's an environmental concern with any type
of water system, right. Well, anytime that you're moving around
a large natural resource like water, you're you're gonna be
(33:46):
You're gonna be screwing with the natural system of things, right,
I mean, which which is on purpose and which is
good because it lets people um survive, but bad and
that you can really mess with the ecology of a
local area. Yeah, you need to take in to consideration
everything from the water that you're taking, Like wherever the
reservoir happens to be, whether it's a lake or a
river or even an artificial reservoir, where is that water
(34:10):
coming from, how is it affecting the ecosystem of the
area from which you are taking, And then everything from
the amount of water that people are using, because water
is not you know, you may have seen things on
television or you know a little reminders in school about
don't waste water. A lot of that has to do
with not just the fact that there's you know, there's uh,
(34:34):
it's a renewable resource, but there's only so much of
it any particular region has at any particular time. It's
also an energy concern because it takes a lot of
energy to gather this water from the source, and even
using gravity, we're still talking about having pumping stations things
like that. So the more water you use, the more
energy has to be uh consumed in order to continue
(34:57):
that that supply of water. Right here in the US,
I think that the e p A reported that, um,
we use three or four percent of our countrywide energy
getting water where it needs to go. And and that's
that's on a national level, and that's only because most
of that is dealt with by municipal systems, where water
treatment is usually the largest consumer of energy without any
(35:19):
given community. Right So, I mean, clearly there are a
lot of concerns for using water wisely, and then of
course the whole treatment process and how that water once
treated as then introduced back into the environment. All of
these things have an impact. And if the if the
treatment facility isn't truly sophisticated, or if it's not adequate,
(35:39):
then you could be making a catastrophic effect on your environment,
which in turn can either directly affect the population that's
getting the water in the first place or other populations
that are downstream or nearby. Right. Yeah, this this can
also get really political. Um yeah, in fact, even within
the United States, it can get political. I know that
sounds of crazy, especially to people who may live outside
(36:02):
of the US and they think of it as a nation,
but we're divided up into states obviously. And uh, here's
a perfect example, Lauren and I. We live in Georgia.
We have two states that border US that use very
similar sources of water, the same source of water at
least for certain regions, Alabama and Florida. They all are
using water that is coming from come downstream from US. Yeah,
(36:24):
from the Chattahoochee actually, and Alabama and Florida often are
um competing for those resources along with Georgia. So if
Georgia decides to do something on a state level that's
going to affect that water source, it impacts these other states,
and you get this kind of tension. This is within
one country where yeah, yeah, and internationally it can get
(36:48):
pretty messy. I just just for example, most of Iraq's
water supply originates and rivers in Turkey, which means that
for for Iraq to get the water that it needs,
conservation efforts have to begin in a whole other country
that they might not be agreeing with very much at
the time. Right. So if you have one country that says,
you know, well, we'll conserve as much as we need
to for our needs, but why should we be considered,
(37:08):
and why should we worry about your needs you're you
don't you're not part of our country. That's sticky, that's
that's you know. I mean obviously it raises up very
tricky ethical questions, and you know, you may not be
at all uh able to affect those the answers to
those questions if you aren't in that particular country. So
you know, it does get pretty sticky. I will say, Yeah,
(37:32):
there's there's a whole bunch of different problems that that
really go on with uh, with with water and how
we're going to kind of bring these old methods of
getting it places and treating it into the future because
you know, we're the population is growing. We're certainly not
going to have less need for water anytime soon. Yeah,
(37:53):
so some things that we can look into or things
like using uh different approaches for agriculture, which would obviously
put less of a demand on our water use. If
we're using fresh water for agriculture, and we can come
up with plants that either need less water, or we
come up with farming techniques that don't use as much water.
(38:13):
Because I mean, there there are other byproducts to this too, Right,
If you have an enormous field that is treated with
various types of herbicides, pesticides, that kind of thing, and
you're using massive amounts of water to distribute those you
get run off of all those chemicals that can then
enter the local water table and that can be a
big problem. So, I mean you can see that this
(38:34):
is not a simple system. It's very complex. Absolutely. And
and also according to the e P, a um of
water treated by water systems is lost to leaks um
in some systems that can be as much as six
The worldwide average is about twenty and and that's you know,
that's a huge amount. All right, So let's talk a
(38:56):
little bit. And you know, we've talked about the challenges
in the state of the art as it is today,
but there are people who are working on some pretty
cool stuff that could in theory really revolutionized water systems. Right. Oh, absolutely, Um,
some of some of the more some of the more
down to earth. I'll cover those first methods. Some some
researchers are talking about the simple act of diverting watershed
(39:18):
of the physical area of land from which you would
get your water. Right because because classically your your watershed
is far away from a city, basically, um, nothing to
do with your cities. But in in these are modern times,
we've got so many more people living in urban areas
and um, so much wasted water coming down in rainfall
(39:38):
on these large urban areas that if we if we
look at at just increasing the system capacity of cities
to deal with that water by by replacing concrete with
porous pavement, by adding more plant life to cities, by
restoring wetlands, or or installing rain barrels and other building
gray water management systems, right, Yeah, gray water is one
(40:00):
of those things that can be incredibly useful for particular applications.
I mean, obviously it's not something that you would necessarily say,
let's hook this up to yeah, and then I'll drink
and then I'll drink, or a bubbler if you prefer. Yeah,
gray water being um, the the basically clean wastewater that
comes from mild householder or commercial applications. Right, And there's
(40:22):
plenty of different uses we could put that to rather
than using I mean, it really does water alan Absolutely,
it's really crazy to think that we have incredibly fresh
water in our toilets. Yeah, that's that's one of those
things that drives me completely. Just when you think that
there are two billion people in Asia who do not
have access to clean water, and we're using drinking water
(40:44):
in our toilets. Yeah, so see, using gray water in
a system like that could end up meaning that that
water could be used in other applications. Obviously, the big
problem with the two billion people in Asia is that
they don't have the systems in place or the resources
available to them. It's not just that the Earth has
an x amount of fresh water that's evenly distributed across
(41:05):
the entire planet, like we're saying, yeah, and you know,
it's it's not the kind of thing where you know,
if if you if you avoid flushing your toilet, that's
not going to give water to the poor kids in China,
like like it's yeah, it's like we said, it's a
little more complicated than that. Okay, so that makes sense. Yeah,
And in some communities are already doing a whole lot
for that. We mentioned in in that in that listener
mail from Valerie, she she had mentioned Las Vegas systems
(41:28):
and they are using a lot of water reclamation in
order to to to stretch the water as far as
it will go because they're kind of in a desert. Yeah,
not one of those areas where they've got, you know,
huge reservoirs that are naturally occurring nearby. It's a little
tricky and I don't know if you know this, but
Las Vegas is kind of a big city. It's got
(41:48):
a few people, a few people in it. I'll be
there soon enough for ce. Yes, that's right, that's coming up.
It's kind of exciting. Also, currently happening lots of new
technology in recycling, purification, and desalination. Yeah, we we've seen
things like the water reclamation technology that NASA has pioneered
(42:09):
has been amazing. Like if you look at the stuff
they have on the International Space Station. And it's not
just NASA, obviously, there are other space organizations, European space organizations, uh,
Russian space organizations that have all contributed to this kind
of body of science and technology. But they really make
water go as far as it possibly can with the
(42:29):
cost of what dollars for a pound of stuff to
send into space, right, you know, every every ounce counts. Yeah,
you don't wanna, you don't want to be constantly they're
thirsty again, gotta lug up another hundred pounds of water
go to the bank. No, it's it's you know, they
have systems that recapture water from everything from the water
(42:51):
vapor and their breath, the sweat, urine, things like that.
You know, not all this water necessarily goes right back
into drinking water either, but it's necessary for the system.
So we can learn from that and use those same
sort of technologies and various applications here on Earth, not
all of them. Obviously. We're not gonna have giant water
vapor uh condensers out there capturing everyone's breath, but probably
(43:15):
probably not in most buildings. Um but I would I
don't know, we might get one in here someday, but
if we could, that would be that would be terrible
and lovely. I feel like Robert would love a love
an art project about that. Um but but yeah, there's
there's lots of really interesting materials and membrane sciences, different
electrical properties of different things. We talked about that a
(43:37):
bunch in our forward thinking episode of desalination, which is
of course, and I mean that is a nice solution
to getting drinking water when you don't have any fresh
water in your Yeah, and there we've also seen some
cool filtration systems that can be used to purify water.
If you have access to water but it's not pure,
(43:58):
you can run it through these things. Dean Cayman worked
on one. I know that Bill Gates is really behind
technologies that are being developed for developing nations that may
have problems getting clean water, and you just you pour
this stuff in on one end and again gravity pulls
the water through the various systems until at the end
(44:21):
of it you get potable drinking water, which is pretty
phenomenal stuff. Now, these are are small, They're meant for
small communities. They're not you know, something that's going to
support an enormous city, and you might need multiple units
depending upon how large the population of that area is.
But it's really promising. But but Lauren, I want to
know about a crazy kind of science fiction e E E
(44:42):
approach to totally renovating the water system. Get anything for me?
I do. In fact, um, have have you heard of
four D printing? Oh? My gosh, four deep printing. I
remember seeing a devastatingly handsome bald Man talk about that
on a video not to long ago. He's kind of narcissistic, though,
(45:03):
I don't know. It's okay, it's okay. When you look
that good, it's completely justified. There there was an episode,
there's another separate episode of forward Thinking that was all
about forty printing and and this is kind of a
kitchy catchphrase, um, but it's we're talking about self assembly really.
Um So, So okay, M I T has a self
assembly lab that's being run by one Skylar Tippets. Great name,
(45:26):
it is a great name. Um he's he's an architect
and and comps I and artist kind of dude. And
um in in M I t S word, self assembly
is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered
structure through local interaction. And so what they're really interested
in here is is using material science and biological science
to create mostly analog devices that can react to changing situations. Right, So,
(45:51):
and and usually it means that you're adding some form
of energy or introducing some new element to this material,
which will then undergo a change in shape or form. Right.
This is a really proof of concept kind of stage.
Right now, they're there at this at this very basic
like they've built a long tube that, when dropped in
water well morph to form the letters M I T. Yeah,
(46:12):
And they had they had one flat piece of it
looks like just plastic, but when you put water on it,
it would form itself into a cube. Um. Yes, you
know you could watch the video and then you see
that it's sped up by about eight times, and you
realize this is a gradual process. It's really slow. I
mean all of this is thanks to a multi material
(46:34):
form of three D printing. Um. And the four D
in in the fourth dimension and in the four D
title is time. Um. But but but so so multi
material three D printing. Since different materials can have different
water absorption properties, Um, you know you can. You can
build them so that they will squish up in different ways. Right,
You've got you've got an interesting approach where you've got
(46:57):
this material that can actually react to changing such a waans.
So if you engineer it so that it behaves a
particular way under a particular se circumstances, there are a
lot of applications that you could put this to, including
completely revolutionizing a water system. Yeah. I mean, you know,
anything is huge as as a water system is a
really long way off from from a cute little tube
(47:19):
that spells out a cute little thing over of course
of several minutes. Um. But but you know, imagine a
pipe that changes shape to accommodate spikes in in in
watershed or water waste or frozen water. Right. Soe now
this would be amazing because, like we had said over
and over again, the water systems we have have formed
over several decades, and they're not uniform at all, and
(47:41):
they you know, some of the pipes are different sizes
than other pipes, and you know, you might have it
where certain parts of a city may have trouble meeting
the water needs of that particular part of the city
compared to others just because the infrastructure doesn't really support
it anymore. If you had pipes that could adjust to
the right to the to the level of demand, then
(48:02):
if the population fluctuated, if it went, you know, got
bigger or smaller, the pipes themselves, in theory, could end
up adjusting themselves to meet whatever the new demand was
to create the optimum water pressure for the amount of
people that it needed to serve um Or what about
a pipe that could shift itself to self repair damage.
(48:23):
And even more freaky than that, which is already amazing,
the idea of you don't have to worry so much
about maintenance because the pipes maintain themselves. They won't really
break because they can just move bits around. It's another
thing that I think is amazing is this idea of
an undulating pipe. Now this is way off into science
fiction future, right, absolutely, but but the the idea of
(48:44):
this is that the pipe can undulate to push water
through itself. So in other words, you don't need pumping stations.
You don't even need to worry about gravity anymore. You've
got pipes that can change their shape and propel the
water through them, providing the water pressure you need. And
it's all built into of the material itself. You don't
have any electronic parts, you don't have any generators. Yeah,
(49:05):
it's just doing it on its own because of the
way that it was constructed. And that's really what I
find phenomenal. It's not like there's some tiny electronic component
inside this stuff. No, it's literally the way it was built. Yeah,
and just because it was built this way, it will
react you know, in X way when why happens because
(49:29):
in some cases it's things like kinetic energy, right, Like
if you know, you might have a sheet of this
stuff and if you throw it on the ground, it
turns into a chair over the course of like minutes.
But anyway, I think the connect ones are a little
bit quicker. Yeah they can be. Yeah, but that would
be you know, that's the kind of stuff we're talking
about now. Granted again this is sci fi science stuff.
(49:51):
Does have a really great Ted talk that will link to.
But but you'll see in this Ted talk he presents
a couple examples of what they're doing right at this
very moment, and it is much less impressive than we've
just made it sound, um, but the potential assuming that
we can get it to work. So I'm really looking
forward to seeing what what what people wind up doing
(50:11):
with that. Yeah, I'm sure we're only you know, thirty
to fifty years away, right right around the same time
that we hit the singularity and right around the time
you know, singularity robot uprising and undulating pipes. They're all
going to come on a Tuesday, So we'll be recording
forward thinking, assuming we're all still around at that point.
I mean, I got no plans. So anyway, this was
one of those topics I thought was really interesting. You know,
(50:33):
it had a historical element to it that was fun
to talk about. It has a real impact on us today,
right now, and the promise of technology in the future
has at least the potential to make it a phenomenally
interesting uh system that we could see, you know, in
a few decades. Assuming that that this is everything's working out.
(50:53):
Obviously it's a lot of work that we're talking about here,
but sure even just just just big data and monitoring techniques. Um,
getting everyone to work kind of together on this problem. UM,
I think is going to be huge satellite data to
to watch stuff. I mean, satellites can can detect changes
in gravity that therefore detect changes in groundwater concentration. That's
(51:15):
pretty incredible. Um. I didn't detect any changes in gravity,
but I only saw the film once, so I have
to see it at least one more time before I
could tell you what it changed. So, if you guys
have anything to to say to us about this or
other topics, why don't you write to us our email
addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com or drop us
a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. You can find
(51:36):
us with the handle of text Stuff H. S. W
and Lauren and I will talk to you again really
soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it has to work dot com
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