[Animats]

India got there on overpopulation. Total fertility rate around 6 in 1965. India does not have enough water for its population.[1] China would have hit similar problems if not for their one-child policy. China managed to avoid the overshoot when medicine starts to work but the economy hasn't developed yet. India didn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_India

[UncleMeat]

Erlich did not say "there will be scarcity." Erlich said that there would be hundreds of millions dead to starvation.

[FredPret]

If you have access to the sea and to uranium you can make all the freshwater you need, even recycle your own wastewater nearly infinitely.

This is a technological and economic problem, not an overpopulation problem.

[JPLeRouzic]

> If you have access to the sea and to uranium you can make all the freshwater you need

I don't believe that would be true on a large scale because the seaside would quickly become polluted with brine, and then having an infinite supply of uranium wouldn't help you.

Desalination only works in the long term if there is an unlimited amount of body water to dilute the brine produced by the process.

[triceratops]

Do you have to release brine directly into the seaside? What about long pipes with holes that go 50-100 kilometers into the sea?

There's no question of polluting all the oceans with brine. They get freshwater from the rain and the salt came from the oceans in the first place. We aren't net destroying water molecules.

[JPLeRouzic]

That's a very theoretical point of view. How to maintain those pipes? In two or three years, they will be full of small mollusks and other seafood.

[FredPret]

There are many sewer and storm outlets just like this all around the world already

[spauldo]

Only the outside. The inside will be full of brine. Once the salinity exceeds a certain value nothing but extremophile bacteria can survive in it.

[mensetmanusman]

No, you just evaporate the brine and then you have a large source of lithium for battery production.

[JPLeRouzic]

No, just use the brine as dirty electrolyte :-)

[spauldo]

Access to the sea, uranium, and thirty years of economic planning, money, and political will to build the infrastructure.

We'd have nuclear desalinization in Los Angeles is it was that easy.

[triceratops]

That article says climate change is an important cause of water scarcity in India. India didn't cause climate change alone or even in large part.

India's TFR dropped below 2 in 2024.