I was once given a similar assignment "write a letter from the German trenches in WWI," did the exact same thing.
It depends on your definition of "dirty water."
When agriculture was invented, it created large numbers of people in one place. This pollutes water, mostly because humans shit all over the place and then dump it in the river. This happened to a much greater extent when we industrialized, with coal dust and other toxins getting into the water supply. Which we now need to (and do) filter out.
This wasn't a concern for most of Earth's existence, and, in many remote places, still isn't a concern. (I'm thinking Arctic here, there's no significant human or industrial presence.)
It's also a matter of immune system. If you're drinking unfiltered water your entire life, you're going to build up a natural resistance to whatever bacteria may be in that water. This can be seen in modern-day - when many tourists go to somewhere with lower water quality, they'll get stomachaches from the water because they're not used to it. (I had that problem when I spent a summer in Warsaw, frex.)
I was wondering when someone would start discriminating based on what instance you made your account on...
Well, lemmygrad for sure is run by tankies, that's kinda the point. Most of it doesn't matter. It's not like they can control anything that happens on other instances.
google en passant
I was wondering... will you upgrade servers, or is there another solution?
Even bad content is still content and gets more engagement than nothing.
Yes, it's expensive. First, it's a pride thing. Billionaires like nothing better than massive projects to feed their ego and show off how rich they are. Second, capitalists so often lack long-term vision. They'll see there's X amount of gold or platinum in an asteroid, they'll try and mine it based on it's current value. Third, building anything in space would create another resource sink, which drives up demand to meet the increase in supply. And fourth, we're currently in a resource crisis. There is not enough rare earth metals, say lithium, for the increase in demand that comes with the increase of electric cars.
The energy required to get out of Earth's orbit is exactly the problem. You can run fifty missions to the asteroid belt from Earth. Or you can send one big mission to Mars, including all the advanced hardware that's needed for them to run asteroid missions. They can then produce the rough equipment, including fuel (CO/O~2~ fuel can be produced on Mars quite easily, and once a source of water can be found, so can CH~4~/O~2~, and the color comes from all the iron) and then they can send fifty missions to the asteroid belt. What you're saving is the effort it would require to get all that rough material out of Earth's gravity.
You're probably not wrong about that. But one of the great values of Mars from a capitalist perspective is that it's really easy to get to the Asteroid Belt from there and easy to send mined materials home from there. IMO, Mars will be an outpost from which to mine asteroids before anything else.
I had paragraphs in when I was writing it. I guess I need to double-space them? One moment... there we go.
As well, the end result of the "yes or no" answer style "democracy" is that you're given two options and have to choose between those options.