Engineers of the New Millennium: The Global Water Challenge
8:00pm
There are about 326 million cubic miles of water on Earth, but only about three-tenths of one percent of it is fresh water that humans can use. The United States alone consumes about 346 billion gallons of fresh water every day. Providing clean water is a classic engineering challenge throughout recorded history. The ancient Romans, with their wide networks of aqueducts and plumbing, thought they had it pretty well figured out; today, engineers around the world are tackling the problem in ways the ancients couldn’t have imagined. The Global Water Challenge explores how the hunt for water has sparked ingenious feats of engineering, and inspired technologies to help us live sustainably with the water we have. In this program we chronicle how the presence — or absence — of water has shaped our history, and how too little and too much of it is radically altering our present and our future.
