Water: A Journey into the Future
By: Abhradeep Chakraborty
Tags: Future, Speculative, Water, Storytelling, Human Resources

Water: A Precious Commodity _ © EconomicTimes

Imagine a radical and different scenario, water has become the monetary unit. We are using it as a medium to buy food, clothes or even shelter. The total fresh water reserves accounts to 2.5 percent of the total water share and around 0.3 percent of which is in its liquid form. According to WHO, 1 in 3 people globally don’t have access to safe drinking water. What if this fresh water becomes the mode of exchange, more precisely what if we add value to the mode of exchange? How would this change our approach towards the way we see money today? Anthropocene has changed the outlook towards the actually value of money. It’s a common observation that we spend money without much thought into the value of the things we are buying. It’s interesting to speculate how things would be as a result of smaller changes at a distant future. Completely changing the monetary unit of regular IOU directly affects our lives. However, we need to consider certain points before jumping into this: water is a highly inflating resource; and is scarce and subject to large scale pollution

If this were to happen, there would be an urgent need to store this monetary unit for later use. The outlook won’t be much different from the one we have right now, but the reason for saving would completely change. Generally, we save money to ensure a better life for ourselves and our future generation but in this case, it would be to save life. The value for something automatically increases when one’s survival is directly dependent on it. Like a coconut on an island, dry leaves in a rain forest, a spark of fire in an icy mountain and a shade in a scorching desert, human life has been shaped by these survival instincts. It’s clear that money value will change when the monetary unit becomes water. The value of water would inflate with the growth of population, directly and indirectly putting pressure over its spread. The population of the world is expected to touch 10 billion by the world 2050 and about 12 billion by 2100. It’s curious to wonder about how the world would look like in the future, and has engaged millions of minds into this field of speculation and speculative design. Speculation takes place in a step by step process and involves a variety of factors contributing to it.

Change is an extensive process. It takes its final form in a number of phases and accounts to all the major happenings in the existing society. Initially, the change would be opposed due to the tendency to cling onto existing situations. This can be termed as the Protest Phase which lasts for around 5–10 years. Large scale uprising would take place as the people will be highly infuriated by this change. Those with the money would take huge reserves of water and store in non-evaporating storage to stock for securing their future, leading to large scale depletion of water resources from their natural holding such as rivers, lakes and ponds. The houses would have larger tanks and condensers almost equal to the floor space of each house. It will be like a large-scale demonetization where people can get the money exchanges with the new money. Drinking water would become both a commodity and an asset. Those on the lower ranks of the ladder would find it hard to cope up with the price of the water and try their best to obtain subsidies in order to stock up like the others. There will be large scale causalities due to deprivation, mob violence and lack of distribution. This Anarchy Phase would begin with a total chaos, fires, pollution, dust and soot affecting all major cities completely distorting the natural water cycle and the water table. Companies would break down, and the prices would skyrocket due to the deflation of holding the money in homes. Those who gained large access to the water resource would have a monopoly in the market. This phase of about 5 years would witness a dysfunctional economy where the gap between the rich and poor would largely increase and the remaining water in liquid form would be exploited and finished. As a result of the widespread fatalities, the fear of extinction would dawn upon the human race. This Awareness Phase would lead to the uprising of thinkers who would work towards a more forgiving future. The ideas of communism and social equity would emerge, resulting in schemes promoting the well being of the community. This would be the longest period which would stretch just over the lifetimes of the existing generation. It would mark the change in the mindset of the people and decisions made on a day to day basis. The passive school of thought would emphasize on the conservation of resources. At the same time, the rest would worry about the widespread depletion and look for alternative sources of water. Technological advancements would lead to various alternatives for obtaining water such as melting of ice and evaporation of ocean water. But there will come a time when all those who have survived along with the new generation exhaust the resources to turn it into currency and what remains would barely sustain the developing population. Yes, now the apocalyptic nature of this change will have subdued and sufficient resources to thrive and grow would be present. Given to this the population would rise gradually, putting pressure on the existing resources. So, what’s the next step? Exploration would come up as the next viable phase, where one could harvest the resources of other potential planets. After years of spending on probes the settlements as we know now would change completely. Slowly, the population would spread over other planets. Technology to create artificial atmosphere being the driving force. Ice and water would be harvested at large scale. The colonies would begin to thrive slowly and money no longer will be an essential thought, given to the abundance of resources. This Saturation Phase would be marked with large chunks of resources for small colonies and also the depreciating concept of money. Over a period of 150 years, the community would now connect by virtue of homogeneity. Strangely the race will have set aside the differences and became a broader whole and as a result even the population growth could be easily speculated, most of the people will be of the similar strata. The so called Utopia will be reached.

Specificity and globalization changed the world in many ways. The internet brought the world closer, the pandemic separated it. But radical economic inputs can completely change the face of the human realm.