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Grey Templar wrote:the atmosphere would become water logged and it would be nearly impossable for the water to remain in vapor form.

there would be eternal rain showers with the water evaporating almosty instantly upon hitting the ground.

*facepalm* Of course. To be honest, it's difficult to imagine a population multiple times that of the earth in an area a fraction of the size.

I think it is exaggerated. Because don't forgot the polar ice caps and antartica still exist and are not populated. Not only that but alot of the big landmasses might be populated but the world is slowly regenerating. Apparently its a shrine world so I think They are getting rid of excess population by moving them to the moons of Saturn.

Well, with the arcane technologies of the 41st Millenium, donèt you think they could...Terraform Terra...

im2randomghgh wrote:Well, with the arcane technologies of the 41st Millenium, donèt you think they could...Terraform Terra...

Thats the thing they don't know how to terraform now....

Yeah, I agree.

I mean haven't we practically sussed water fusion. Surely that would be do-able on a large enough scale?

I think the human population became so big that the planet's water is eternally cycled through the human machine. That means there isn't enough excess water to fill the oceans, we're always using it. I view "boiled away" as the words of an exagerated poet.

Or just history being re-written. Whatever wasn't being recycled was so polluted it probably wasn't considered water anymore.

Mr Nobody wrote:I think the human population became so big that the planet's water is eternally cycled through the human machine. That means there isn't enough excess water to fill the oceans, we're always using it. I view "boiled away" as the words of an exagerated poet.

Hadn't considered that...

Asherian Command wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:hot enough to boil water?

hell yeah, it would be impossable to live on a planet with that temperature.


Humans would boil away.

they have coolants.

No, they have something better.


They have Gillette anti-perspirant.

Laodamia wrote:

Asherian Command wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:hot enough to boil water?

hell yeah, it would be impossable to live on a planet with that temperature.


Humans would boil away.

they have coolants.

No, they have something better.


They have Gillette anti-perspirant.

Congratulations, your post made my day

I actually remember reading a book with a chapter about how the oceans would eventually evaporate... but it would take at least 100 million years.

smithy12262 wrote:Yeah, I agree.

I mean haven't we practically sussed water fusion. Surely that would be do-able on a large enough scale?

This gives me an idea: maybe the oceans were destroyed when the water molecules making them were split into its constituent atoms for Hydrogen fusion.

Fusion doesn't use water, but a Hydrogen isotope(deutrium. also the explosive in Bolter shells) which is commonly found in water.


no way they used the water up that way.

the Deutrium reserves of the planet are enough for several billion years of energy. even by 40k standards, that a long time.

Grey Templar wrote:Fusion doesn't use water, but a Hydrogen isotope(deutrium. also the explosive in Bolter shells) which is commonly found in water.


no way they used the water up that way.

the Deutrium reserves of the planet are enough for several billion years of energy. even by 40k standards, that a long time.

You say "even by 40k standards" but consider the countless quadrillions (quintillions?) of bolter shells made on Terra BEFORE they started being made exclusively on FWs.

it still wouldn't have used up all the water because not all the water was suitible to begin with.

Grey Templar wrote:who says they need to import water and where is the evidence?


they just reclycle the water they currently have(where it came from is up to debate)

From the Wh40k Wikipedia: "Terra's oceans long ago boiled away due to the immense heat produced by having so many billions of people compressed onto one world. All liquid water to meet the population's needs is now delivered from orbit by freighters who take large ice-bearing comets from the outer Solar System and bring them into Terran orbit to be melted down and dispersed to the population."

A logical conclusion, large number of comets are consisting of Ice believe it or not. And they probably go to Kepler's belt ( witch is outer solar system where their is untold millions if not billions of comets ) and they take comet there and transport it to Terra.

Also, they can use Ice from Europa, it's solid Ice moon in orbit around Jupiter. With rumor that there is an entire ocean below.


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Asherian Command wrote:Because don't forgot the polar ice caps and antartica still exist and are not populated.

And I am pretty sure that ENTIRE planet s one big Hive City.


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Asherian Command wrote:Thats the thing they don't know how to terraform now....

Yes they do. Imperial nobility is constantly making garden worlds for their pleasure.

Given the advanced recycling used in Hive Cities and the enormous populations, this could easily be waved aside with fluff additions stating that it's tied up in the cities, or constantly being cleansed for use. Also, millions come to die on Terra daily. That's a lot of water influx.

Oceans boiling away? Not really, maybe if you orbital striked the planet or exterminatus.... but water can in theory disappear from a planet in a number of ways.

As stated before, become trapped in the human cycle, most (if not all) the water is consumed by humans and it isn't released back fast enough. The consumption exceeds the replenishment... Plus with the billions of people on the planet.... It seems very plausible.

Another theory that was stated before by Grey Templar

the atmosphere would become water logged and it would be nearly impossable for the water to remain in vapor form.

there would be eternal rain showers with the water evaporating almosty instantly upon hitting the ground.

got me thinking about a space documentary I heard a couple years ago. I found that theory! It happened with Venus, and I'm sure someone said this before. I think it's called the Hydronamic escape of Hydrogen, you can google that. Basically, the theory states (and this is my interpretation, go look on google if you want), that solar winds from the Sun can give enough energy to the hydrogen particles in the atmosphere to achieve escape velocity. This slowly releases the hydrogen into space. With no hydrogen, water molecules cannot be formed, and essentially the oceans have been "boiled" away by the sun.

blazinpsycho&typhooni wrote:As stated before, become trapped in the human cycle, most (if not all) the water is consumed by humans and it isn't released back fast enough. The consumption exceeds the replenishment... Plus with the billions of people on the planet.... It seems very plausible.

No, it is not possible, it is completely unrealistic, even for 40k!

If I got this theory right, it would mean that all the water on Earth has been trapped into human bodies right?

There are 1,3.10^19 liters of water on Earth. That means 13 000 000 000 000 000 000 of liters! 13 billions of billions liters of water.

A human body is made of 42 liters of water. Let's rise it to 50 liters to ease the calculations and to count the amount of water that is constantly being recycled.

(1,33.10^19) / 50 = 2,6.10^17

That's 260 millions of billions of humans on Terra. It sounds a bit too much...

Asherian Command wrote:I think it is exaggerated. Because don't forgot the polar ice caps and antartica still exist and are not populated. Not only that but alot of the big landmasses might be populated but the world is slowly regenerating. Apparently its a shrine world so I think They are getting rid of excess population by moving them to the moons of Saturn.

Well the South Pole at least is used as the Inquisitions headquarters, it's probably a continent-sized complex like the Imperial and Ecclesiarchical Palaces.

But yes if the oceans "boiled away" Antartica should have been the first to go. It's a contradiction and I think the only explanation is just fluff error.

Antarctica is a true continent, not just one gigantic ice shelf. Here's a height map of hte bedrock under the ice:



Sure, it'd be greatly diminished in size, but it owuldn't simply vanish.

The population of the earth will reach 7 billion this year, and we are already running out of fresh water. How bad would water consumption be when earth became a hive world?

Mr Nobody wrote:The population of the earth will reach 7 billion this year, and we are already running out of fresh water. How bad would water consumption be when earth became a hive world?

This is because only now we are developing technology to purify water. And why would that be a problem for galaxy span empire? If they can Terraform worlds then there is no problem in getting water to Terra.

Brother Coa wrote:

Mr Nobody wrote:The population of the earth will reach 7 billion this year, and we are already running out of fresh water. How bad would water consumption be when earth became a hive world?

This is because only now we are developing technology to purify water. And why would that be a problem for galaxy span empire? If they can Terraform worlds then there is no problem in getting water to Terra.

I'm saying the population became so vast, that the earth's oceans have been completely consumed. Water is imported becasue we have exceded past the resources of the planet.

Water that is consumed is not destroyed. It just changes form, and eventually passes through the body via moisture leaving the body through various bodily functions (or just leaving the body via evaporation, such as the moisture you lose just by breathing due to the need to not have your mouth, throat, lungs, alveoli, etc. dry up).

The average person in a civilized country uses 450 liters of water a day. This water is not lost, but it must be recycled. There are 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 or so liters of water in the oceans alone. Assuming everyone used exactly the same amount of water as we do now (which is ludicrously inefficient, and does not match with 40k's fluff), the population would need to be 2,888,888,888,888,888,889 or more to use up all of the water in the oceans.

That number is about 10,000 or so times higher than the hive world with the highest known population (which was upwards of 10 trillion if I remember correctly). So yeah, even if we assume there's a hive world with 100 tillion people in it, Earth would STILL have had to have a population at LEAST one thousand times higher than this to use up all fo the water in the ocean.

And this does not count the amount of water in rivers, lakes, streams, aqueous rocks, or in the atmosphere.

Melissia wrote:Water that is consumed is not destroyed. It just changes form, and eventually passes through the body via moisture leaving the body through various bodily functions (or just leaving the body via evaporation, such as the moisture you lose just by breathing due to the need to not have your mouth, throat, lungs, alveoli, etc. dry up).

The average person in a civilized country uses 450 liters of water a day. This water is not lost, but it must be recycled. There are 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 or so liters of water in the oceans alone. Assuming everyone used exactly the same amount of water as we do now (which is ludicrously inefficient, and does not match with 40k's fluff), the population would need to be 2,888,888,888,888,888,889 or more to use up all of the water in the oceans.

That number is about 10,000 or so times higher than the hive world with the highest known population (which was upwards of 10 trillion if I remember correctly). So yeah, even if we assume there's a hive world with 100 tillion people in it, Earth would STILL have had to have a population at LEAST one thousand times higher than this to use up all fo the water in the ocean.

And this does not count the amount of water in rivers, lakes, streams, aqueous rocks, or in the atmosphere.

Machines use water as well.

Yes... and yet, the planet would still basically have to be covered almost entirely by machines to use this much water.

What I'm trying to impress is that the amount of water on this planet is seriously unfathomably large. About 1.4×10^21 kilograms, a number that's pretty much too much for the human mind to really comprehend. It's measured in billions of cubic kilometers. And none of this water is used up, it's not gone when it's used, it just needs to be recycled.

im2randomghgh wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:hmmmm, seems a little off.


"The oceans boiled away because of the heat from people living there"

now that is wrong and is definitly old fluff.

What. You dont think that with the factories, furnaces oven etc. required to sustain 100,000,000,000,000 people + their body heat would be that hot.

sry for having no question marks, my keyboard is a little off right now.

If it was hot enough to boil water at sea level, the planet would be a death world. It is more plausable that the seas were force evaporated so it could be used to support hive cities.

Melissia wrote:Or just history being re-written. Whatever wasn't being recycled was so polluted it probably wasn't considered water anymore.

Yer water is a pretty simple molecule and we have the technology to purify and seperate molecules already. No matter how polluted water is it can still be purified.

Brother Coa wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:who says they need to import water and where is the evidence?


they just reclycle the water they currently have(where it came from is up to debate)

From the Wh40k Wikipedia: "Terra's oceans long ago boiled away due to the immense heat produced by having so many billions of people compressed onto one world. All liquid water to meet the population's needs is now delivered from orbit by freighters who take large ice-bearing comets from the outer Solar System and bring them into Terran orbit to be melted down and dispersed to the population."

A logical conclusion, large number of comets are consisting of Ice believe it or not. And they probably go to Kepler's belt ( witch is outer solar system where their is untold millions if not billions of comets ) and they take comet there and transport it to Terra.

Also, they can use Ice from Europa, it's solid Ice moon in orbit around Jupiter. With rumor that there is an entire ocean below.


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Asherian Command wrote:Because don't forgot the polar ice caps and antartica still exist and are not populated.

And I am pretty sure that ENTIRE planet s one big Hive City.


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Asherian Command wrote:Thats the thing they don't know how to terraform now....

Yes they do. Imperial nobility is constantly making garden worlds for their pleasure.

Not the entire planet is a huge hive, since the Imperial Palace is the size of a continent.

And they no longer know how to terraform, though they did during the GC. The garden worlds have to be verdant to begin with.


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Laodamia wrote:

blazinpsycho&typhooni wrote:As stated before, become trapped in the human cycle, most (if not all) the water is consumed by humans and it isn't released back fast enough. The consumption exceeds the replenishment... Plus with the billions of people on the planet.... It seems very plausible.

No, it is not possible, it is completely unrealistic, even for 40k!

If I got this theory right, it would mean that all the water on Earth has been trapped into human bodies right?

There are 1,3.10^19 liters of water on Earth. That means 13 000 000 000 000 000 000 of liters! 13 billions of billions liters of water.

A human body is made of 42 liters of water. Let's rise it to 50 liters to ease the calculations and to count the amount of water that is constantly being recycled.

(1,33.10^19) / 50 = 2,6.10^17

That's 260 millions of billions of humans on Terra. It sounds a bit too much...

Terra's population: 100,000,000,000,000, also your failing to account for the pools etc. of the nobility. And the fact that custodes are 2x bigger than humans (though that wouldn't make much of a difference), water used for cooling...so yeah, the majority would be in the human beings.

That's still not a high enough population to consume all of that water.

That would still only consume a fraction of a percent.

Maybe not all of the water is consumed, maybe there is still a lot of water beneath the hive city.


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im2randomghgh wrote:
Not the entire planet is a huge hive, since the Imperial Palace is the size of a continent.

That's pretty much the entire planet.

im2randomghgh wrote:And they no longer know how to terraform, though they did during the GC. The garden worlds have to be verdant to begin with.

They still know how, there is no evidence to support that they don't know. And Terraforming is easy if you have the technology the Imperium have, only problem is that the Terraforming is that it may last for xxx years...

And besides, what do Tau know about Earth? None has ever been there...