Water on Mars
This is adapted from ‘Water on the moon’ by Peter Scales in Thoughts for
Mornings, published on Kindle.
Water is the very stuff of life; nothing – humans, animals, plants
– can exist without it. Approximately 65% of the human body
is actually made up of water. Water helps us to digest food and
to carry waste products from our bodies; it carries nutrients to
all the cells in our bodies; it stimulates electrical activity in the
brain, and it lubricates our joints. Above all water keeps us alive.
We can survive for about three weeks without food, although I
don’t recommend trying it, but without water we would be lucky
to last three days.
We take water for granted. We turn on our taps and instantly
have a supply of clean, safe drinking water. We ush our toilets
and wash our clothes without a care for where the water comes
from or whether it will continue to ow. We demand green
lawns and sprinkle them until threatened with a hosepipe ban.
We insist that our cars should be sparkling and shining and bathe
them lovingly.
But water has a cost. We pay our bills to ensure a safe and regular
supply. But it has another, more important cost – a human one. In
the West, our water-hungry lifestyles contrast sharply with those
less-developed countries where water is scarce and frequently
polluted. In the United Kingdom we each use, on average, 150
litres of water every day; in Australia people use 500 litres a
day; Americans get through 570 litres. Our excessive demand
for more water means others have less. In Accra, Ghana, water
costs three times as much as it does in New York.
Next time you buy a bag of salad from the supermarket, consider
the cost of it in water and human suffering. Some of the world’s
biggest exporters of lettuce drill deep into underground aquifers
to irrigate salad crops which are then picked by poorly paid
migrant workers who have little or no sanitation, or access to
safe drinking water. The salad is then washed, using more water,
bagged and transported to wealthy countries where about 60%
of it is thrown away, without ever being on a plate.
1.1 billion people – a fth of the world’s population – have no
access to safe drinking water. 2.4 billion people lack sanitation.
Every fteen seconds a child dies because of a shortage of fresh
water, that’s ve million deaths a year. Approximately 700,000
children, almost 2000 a day, die every year from diarrhoea
because of unsafe water and poor sanitation. Water, truly, is
the stuff of life. We can be certain that even life on Mars could
not have existed without it. Scientists have discovered water in
the Martian polar caps and, recently, the Curiosity Mars rover
discovered that Martian dirt is approximately 2% water. The
cost of the Curiosity Mars mission is roughly 2.5 billion dollars.
There are probably millions of children who wish that such
sums were spent on providing water for them – on Earth.

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