Where Is All the Water Going?

Last night I had a vivid and unsettling dream about drought, food and water shortages, transportation problems, dirty oxygen equipment and being woefully unprepared.

I woke up wondering: What do we do about all of this?

Then, while still in bed—yes, I was perusing LinkedIn in bed—I saw a CNBC post about drought affecting rivers in Europe, Panama and the USA and what declining water levels could mean for humans. I left a comment asking, “What can we do about it?”

Then I got up.

Coffee was the mission, but first my incredibly cute—and often annoying—Yorkie-mix fur babies needed to be let out and fed. 😂 Then came my morning walk.

Normally I spend much of my walk praying, sometimes offering rather redundant requests to the wishing well in the cosmos many of us call God. I love God. But this morning I was mostly quiet.

I simply gave thanks.

I felt emptied.

There's an ancient spiritual idea that an already-full vessel has no room to receive anything new. Whatever one believes about God, Spirit or the universe, I think there's something worth considering in that.

As my body warmed up and my mind quieted, I thought again about the drought story.

And a ridiculously simple question appeared:

Where is all the water going?

Water doesn't simply disappear.

I understand that weather patterns are cyclical. I also understand that a warming planet affects evaporation, precipitation, snowpack and soil moisture.

But where does the water actually go?

The universe wasn't answering me in words, so I turned to my partner in crime, ChatGPT, and started investigating. 🤖

The answer led to more questions—which, in my opinion, is one of the best uses of AI.

Water is constantly moving among oceans, atmosphere, soil, rivers, groundwater, snow and ice. The problem isn't simply how much water exists on Earth. It's whether usable freshwater is available where and when people, agriculture and ecosystems need it.

And that's where my systems brain kicked in.

Agriculture needs enormous amounts of water. So do power generation, manufacturing, semiconductor production, mining, food processing and countless other industries. AI data centers can also require significant water, directly for cooling and indirectly through the electricity that powers them.

So perhaps every industry—and every community planning for growth—should be asking:

Where does our water come from?

How much are we actually using?

Who else depends on the same watershed or aquifer?

What happens during a prolonged drought? What happens as the population grows?

Are we returning water to the system in usable condition?

Could we cool, manufacture, irrigate, build or operate differently?

And my favorite systems question:

At what cost?

Not because technology, agriculture, development or industry is inherently bad. Humanity needs these things.

But resources have limits. Systems are interconnected. And decisions create consequences somewhere—even when those consequences don't immediately appear on our own balance sheet.

AI helped me rapidly sort through an enormous amount of information this morning and understand a complicated subject well enough to begin asking better questions.

But AI couldn't decide which questions humanity should ask.

That's still our job.

Maybe the future of human + AI intelligence isn't about getting machines to give us all the answers.

Maybe it's about using them to help us sort through mountains of information—sometimes conflicting information—so that humans can do something much more important:

Think deeply enough to ask better questions.

So I'll leave you with mine:

If your work, industry or community depends heavily on water, what questions should the rest of us be asking that we aren't asking yet? 💧🌎