All of esperent's Comments + Replies

Evaporating into the 'wild' isn't profitable, so it's understandable that no one sought this route - I only expect a government to fund it, because they'd see returns in taxes regardless of which farm got rain. There's also a loooong history of simple solutions going unnoticed for decades; I mentioned a few when Julia Wise argued the same on the EA Forum cross-post. Another example of "simple-and-ignored" to add to the mix: last year, a mathematician was in a class on Knot Theory, and the teacher mentioned that "the Conway 11-Knot is unsolved"... she took a look at it, thought about it intermittently for a few days, and came back to her teacher saying "What about doing it this way?" She was right - Quanta magazine wrote her up! It turned out, EVERYONE had missed a simple solution, after writing it up in journals, grad students struggling in vain hope, Conway himself miffed, for FIFTY years. Yup. Simple is invisible, sometimes. Geopolitical issues are only certain regions. Others, like California, are begging for evaporators! Australia? It's all just one contiguous desert, and they were trying cludgier water pipeline projects decades ago. Southeast India, too. And if Libya only received a quarter of the rain they threw into the air, it'd still be good for them. Lithium ponds are doing a separation; they are intentionally not evaporating as fast as possible as much as possible. A better area of industry to look at: spray & contact cooling. When machines or air-flows are hot, we create a lot of wet surface area, and we measure the evaporation from those surfaces. By having hundreds of yarns per square yard, hanging in parallel, you expose the air to hundreds of times more surface area than a pond does. And, the air-flow moves among the strands, while ponds create a layer of 100% humidity that buffers further evaporation. When industry wants to cool things, they use wet surface area, and a dense array of threads maximizes that surface area. For salt, I already menti