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Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Put simply, the Imperium has the resources to use extremely inefficient storage media out of pure affectation. The amount of redundancies and intricate supply chains pretty much kill the notion that Terra could be blockaded into submission.

Also, they use vellum otherwise doing this wouldn't be exciting action movie

https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/9v00so/book_excerpt_the_bleeding_chalice_what_happens_on/

Tsagualsa wrote:
water is the most common molecule in the universe

No, that would be H2, followed by CO. Water is actually pretty rare, and even more common -OH group isn't that abundant either.

On a planetary scale, you also don't really lose any of it unless you bind it in minerals at an absurd scale

Or, you know, burn it in a fusion reactor. Or supply all the space ships you send out in fuel, both chemical (hydrogen is really common in pretty much all of these) and fusion engine stock. Hell, even hypothetical antimatter reactors are easiest to make if you use the antimatter pellets to ignite hydrogen fusion, getting massively more energy out per unit of (really expensive) antimatter. That would account for pretty big losses too, no hand-wave needed.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Yeah, when people talk about that, I always ask "how does steam not escape gravity now?"

Actually hydrogen loss is a pretty big problem thanks to lightness of the molecule and solar wind interactions carrying it away. Earth used to have far more of it but we lost it over the eons. Ditto for Venus, it's atmosphere is pretty much all CO2 now because free hydrogen had been nearly entirely blown away.

And the process is sped up in a hotter atmosphere, it's a good thing it won't even happe-- Wait a minute

 Mr Nobody wrote:
So the water and wildlife was somewhere out there. I like to think that there is enough people and machinery that most of the earth's water is tied up in industry.

Eh, that's unlikely, you can't tie up that much water without industry making Mars look like a shoddy backwater. And in any case, it would be much cheaper and faster to just import water from Europa, Neptune, or Enceladus. The only problem would be bringing it down from orbit without turning it into superheated steam which would be a pretty big bummer for the planetary population below...