From Wallace’s joke to the future: how the world will look at the future – a renewable energy approach towards sustainable regenerative energy systems

It is possible to shift away from the hard path. Central to this change will be a transition to a focus on demand, efficiency and reuse, and on protecting and restoring ecosystems harmed by centuries of abuse. Society must move away from thinking about how to take more water from already over-tapped rivers, lakes and aquifers, and instead find ways to do the things we want with less water. Water technologies that enable people to grow more food, reduce the amount of water used to flush toilets, and find and plug leaks in water distribution systems and homes are included.

David Foster Wallace made a famous joke about one fish saying to another, “How’s the water?” The second fish replies: “What the hell is water?”

Water intended for drinking also requires clean and free of contaminants, no matter how plentiful the supply. Among the most pernicious are the ‘forever’ chemicals known as PFAS: chains of carbon and fluorine atoms held together by some of the strongest chemical bonds in nature, and impervious to most attempts to break them down. But engineers are devising various methods to crack them apart and purify PFAS-contaminated water.

Climate change is increasing water’s danger. Minimizing its effects will require a large-scale push towards renewable power sources, but these tend to be intermittent, and therefore dependent on technologies to store and transport energy. Hydrogen can be formed by using the electrical power of water. There is an inherent tension in the fact that an economy reliant on hydrogen energy will inevitably consume a lot of water. Reducing hydrogen’s water footprint is an important focus as renewable sources become a bigger part of the energy picture.

The FII Institute: A New Look at the Past, Present, Future, and Future. I. Computational Modeling and the Observed Statistical Properties of the Nucleon

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