So the people on the atoll value hydro so much they use it for currency. But they do have a reasonable amount of technology and Old Things. They must have figured out how to distill water by then. I don’t think they had anything much in the way of fuel so it would have to be solar. The water for all those people had to come from somewhere but all they were able to make is barely enough?
And what about the Smokers on the Deez? Lots of them and at least they had fuel. Would the Exxon Valdez have had a distillation plant in real life?
The Mariner had that little filter system but it didn’t look too complex so it should have been scalable. In the Extended Cut there is a scene where the woman and the girl contribute their urine to the system so they can have more water. She asks the Mariner why he doesn’t use sea water. He replies it is “hard on the filter”. Reverse osmosis, I guess but what would the membrane by made of. He could still add small amounts of sea water to help out.
BUT - and this is a big but - would not the extra water around the world have been fresh and thus fairly dilute overall?
“Everyone I know has a big but. C’mon, Simone, let’s talk about your big but.”-Pee Wee Herman
All the ice and fresh water makes up about 2% of all the water on the world, so it isn’t going to dilute it much at all.
Also, if all the glaciers melted, the seas would rise all of about 200 feet. Catastrophic to society, but hardly “Everest is the only land left” high. Even tall buildings in NYC would have their top halves above water.
Now that raises a good point. If there was additional water added to earth to raise the sea level to Everest (like from a comet) and it was fresh water, what would be the resulting salinity of the ocean?
Googling, it appears that adding enough water to cover the entire planet to the height of Mount Everest would require several times the amount of water already present on the planet. I think that means that ocean water would still be saline, just not nearly as much?
Well, that water was magical, so we do not know. If all the Ice melted sea level would only rise 70meters/230 feet- and that would only lower the salinity by a small amount. So we do not know where the extra 28000 feet of water came from. I suspect “a wizard did it”, and they asked for salt water.
True, but in the film it is as high as Mount Everest. I don’t have any idea where it came from but if it was rained on top of the oceans from the firmament * There have been solar pools made with varying levels of salinity from dense salt water on the bottom to fresh water on top. They do not intermix.
*I worked with a Morman engineer at NASA. That was his answer to where the biblical flood came from. The firmament.
Ships at sea will typically have deslinisation equipment on board to make freshwater from sea water should they need it, and the Valdez definitely had one.
Waterworld’s reported budget was $172 million, and a total outlay of $235 million once marketing and distribution costs are factored in.[2] Because of the runaway costs of the production, some critics dubbed it “Fishtar”[29] and “Kevin’s Gate”,[30] alluding to the flops Ishtar and *[Heaven’s Gate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven’s_Gate_\(film\) "Heaven’s Gate (film
)")*.
The film debuted at the box office at No. 1.[31][32] For its first weekend, Waterworld collected a total of $21.6 million.[33] At the end of its run, the film grossed $88 million at the North American box office, and $176 million overseas, for a worldwide total of $264 million.[3]</sup
After factoring in home video sales and TV broadcast rights among other revenue streams, it eventually became profitable.[34][35]
The “extended universe” for Waterworld, mostly a limited run of comics and video games indicate that a lot of the water came from comets or other outside sources, not just the melting icecaps, and includes a society of domed scientists doing genetic engineering leading to icthyus sapiens.
But yeah, it’s still basically just a magic conceit anyway.
My very limited understanding of various saline converters (mostly from online research, commercial plants, and homesteading/survival works) indicates that outside the most basic boil/condense options, that it’s finicky and or dependent on consumables. Most of which you’d expect to be used up/in short supply in the atolls and even among the smokers.
It’s been quite a while since the deluge started including several decades of hybrid land dwellers and increasing fleets/atolls of displaced peoples. One implication of the movie is that we may be seeing an end to humanity - so many atolls destroyed, genetic bottlenecks, difficulty of finding new/different people across the endless water.
Things are just getting worse with the various travelers getting more isolated, more crazy, and flat out fewer. No regular trade (and little TO trade) between settlements. And of course, it leaves out the little thing (also in the EU) as to why Enola has no parents - they died from “the black bone plague” which was a big part of the early drafts, taking out entire fleets and atolls as well.
So, yeah, even if the Mariner brings in everyone he finds to Dryland, the unmodified human species may be heading past the brink already.
Of course, if a comet with 5 times the volume of all the water currently in the world hit the earth, the rising sea levels would be the least of our worries.
