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Part 6:  Necessary Components for Community Sustainability

Clean Water Production and Delivery

To state that access to clean water is critical to human survival is so obvious, and we have it in such great abundance that it is very often overlooked by the average American. However, making clean water that doesn't threaten our very existence upon drinking requires extremely advanced technologies that have only been in existence for the last century. Before that, measured in literally thousands of years, the human population did not have water easily available to them that would not potentially kill them. To overcome this danger, it became a common practice to create liquids through fermentation that contained alcohol. The most common examples were beer and wine. The alcohol acted as a disinfectant.

Unfortunately, the side effect to this was that for thousands of years the human population from childhood onward were semi-drunk which as the early industrialist learned is not conducive to creating and maintaining advanced civilizations. So in a very real sense, the growth and expansion of the first industrial revolution became possible when potable water became widely available and the average person did not have to drink fluids containing alcohol to assure continued health. Today most communities in first world countries use one of several approaches to destroy the biological contagions that have been the scourge of generations past. The most common has been to first filter the water then apply chlorine compounds.

The second and more recent approach has been to use electrical power to produce intense ultraviolet light that causes breakdown of bacteria and viruses at the molecular level.

Another possible approach is to take the powerful gamma emitting radioactive isotopes that are by products from nuclear fission power plants, and place them in sealed containers and allow this extremely energetic light to do the same thing that presently ultraviolet light now does within the water purification process.

One of the greatest advantages to using long-lived gamma emitters is that once it is in place, it will require very little maintenance. As a result, only a few people are needed to maintain this system in order to provide plenty of clean water to a very large population for many years without replacement. This will be important when the economic system has collapsed and every individual's time becomes much more precious to maintaining production.

Clean Water Production and Delivery
Food
Shelter and Transportation
Lighting
Heating
Clothing
Medicine
Sanitation and Waste Disposal
Generation of Raw Materials
Chemical Processing
Processing of Raw Materials - Tool and Die
Communication
Computing Technology
Education
Maintaining of Standards
Justice
Defense

Part 7: Our Future Under the Fourth Industrial Revolution

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