This is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Wired is carrying a story about a bacteria-driven waste water treatment unit designed at Sam Houston State University. Two units are being sent to Afghanistan and another may be sent to Haiti.
These crate-sized units use common ground bacteria to clean waste water in about 24 hours without producing any toxic byproducts. Modern waste treatment plants don't even come close to that kind of efficiency.
Once commercial production begins for this technology, it will probably be used on planes, trains, buses, ships, and in remote outposts. But it could also be combined with other technologies such as drawing water from humidity that harvest moisture even from desert air. Desert communities and homesteads can be built that work somewhat like Star Wars' "moisture farms" on the arid planet Tattooine (where Anakin Skywalker was born and his son Luke was later raised in secret by Owen and Beru Lars).
Numerous proposals have been put forward for decreasing salinity in salt lakes and using waste water treatment to produce electricity. Water desalination and treatment is expensive, time-consuming, and requires a lot of energy.
Solar-based and bacterial initiatives may help reduce the costs of producing or recovering potable water from waste and salty water sources (lakes and seas). The military and disaster-recovery markets will probably lead the way as they have high demand for low-cost water production and management technologies, but eventually there will be industrial, residential, and even perhaps ecological benefits from the technology.
I believe firmly that we should be transforming our deserts into habitable lands for ourselves and wildlife. Southeast Australia, one of the greenest areas of the southern continent, began drying out 15 years ago.
In a matter of decades, environmentalists will no longer be charged with preserving natural desert habitats -- they will be mandated with creating new habitats to keep our ecosystem alive. That transformation cannot begin until people change the way they think about the environment and how man can and should interact with it. We're not going away any time soon (I hope), and we are part of the environment, not outside of it.
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