Mammals your size generally last closer to 10 million, meaning that your journey should have barely begun. Out of all of those mammal species, you’re the only one which knows this, yet you treat your descendants as though they won’t need anything you’ve had. This is a sad thing to me. It is perhaps odd that I, an alien, feel more empathy for those impoverished future multitudes than their own grandparents do; this is one of the few downsides of being a xenologist. The Bottom Line: Because we use up the best first, all non- renewable resources (including ores and minerals) are becoming more and more energetically remote.
Water
Summary: Energetic remoteness applies to other key natural resources as well. If there’s one thing that’s easy to take for granted, it’s water. Our world – seen from space – looks like it’s made of water. Most of us can access seemingly unlimited water just by walking to one of many faucets in the average house. We drink it, water our lawns with it, bathe in it, flush away our bodily wastes with it, and just generally use a whole bunch of it without much thought.
Yet “liquid water” is the primary difference between our planet and ones that are not able to support life as we know it. The water visible from space exists in a thin skin covering the ocean basins, and by volume, is a small part of the planet, as seen in the image above. Water is life’s essential ingredient. Its near-magical properties enable the electrochemistry of cells, the mobility of proteins, and the distribution of food and energy to the cells within a multicellular animal. All life is tied to the availability of water and its essential properties.
For land plants and animals, that means “fresh” water – non-salty – which
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