July 2044
Dr. Robert Clifford sat calmly in the studio waiting room. His composed demeanor was on full display while he gingerly sipped lukewarm tea from his ceramic cup. Dr. Martin Chambeaux, his understudy and right hand, was quite the contrary. He frantically paced back and forth and furiously slurped boiling hot coffee from his twenty-ounce stainless steel thermos.
“You know your opening?” Chambeaux asked.
“Cold,” Clifford said.
“And you have all of your rebuttals lined up?”
“Yep.”
Chambeaux was appeased for a moment but then fired back, “What about stats? Do you want to review the numbers?”
“Martin, I’m ready.”
“Sorry, I just can’t believe this is happening.”
“People are finally listening to us which for them means ratings. Don’t be flattered. It’s absolutely a business decision.”
An endearing, adolescent program assistant knocked on the waiting room door and poked her head in. “Marianne is ready for you, Dr. Clifford.”
Clifford stood up, offered a confident wink to Chambeaux and proceeded into the studio’s main interview room. It was cozy and boutique, arranged to resemble a suburban family room. There were two loveseats angled towards one another with a roundtable overflowing with peace lilies in between. A fire crackled in the background. There were even paintings of breathtaking landscapes and floral masterpieces fastened to the walls outside the scope of the camera’s view. A more relaxed interviewee made for a better interview, Clifford hypothesized. As he took in the rest of the room, a bombshell in her fifties who might’ve passed for thirty in the right light approached.
“Dr. Clifford, I’m Marianne Walsh. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Ms. Walsh, the pleasure is all mine.”
A seasoned veteran jaded by decades of small talk, she cut right to business. “You ready to get started?”
“Only for the past ten years,” Clifford said.
“Just a reminder that we’ll be live. There’s a short tape delay but please make it easy on production, no profanities.”
Clifford nodded in understanding as they took their seats. A makeup artist performed a final touch-up on Marianne’s face and the cameraman jumped behind the lens. “Five, four, three,” he said before using his fingers for the last two counts as the red light flipped on.
“Good evening and welcome to Primetime Live. We’re joined by a unique guest tonight, world-renowned hydrologist, Dr. Robert Clifford. Thank you so much for being here.”
“Thank you for having me,” Clifford replied without a hint of nerves.
“Dr. Clifford, let me start out by asking what exactly a hydrologist does? It’s not a science we’re accustomed to hearing about on a daily basis.”
“Sure, Marianne. Put simply, hydrology is the study of water. All of its properties, its impact on the environment, its abilities, everything.”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“You’ve published some very intriguing articles that really have our nation talking. For those not privy to your theories, bring them up to speed.”
“These aren’t theories. I’m a scientist and we deal in facts. And the fact of the matter is, the biggest threat our world faces today is population control and its subsequent impact on our freshwater supply.”
“Can you elaborate?” Marianne probed.
“Did you know that seventy percent of the world is water but only two and a half percent of that water is drinkable freshwater? And of that freshwater, only about one percent is easily accessible with the rest buried deep inside polar ice caps and glaciers, effectively unreachable.”
“But hasn’t that always been the case?”
“It has but the delta is the number of people competing for these finite resources. There are over nine billion people living on Earth as of this very moment. A hundred years ago there were under two billion. Advances in modern medicine are going to push that figure to almost twelve billion in the next thirty years.”
“Why is that?”
“Put simply, people just aren’t dying as fast as they used to. We’re experiencing prolonged life expectancies on a global level. Heck, stem-cell therapies could see newborns living into their mid-hundreds. So unless NASA is building a secret colony in the sky we don’t know about, we simply don’t have the resources to accommodate our own population growth. By extending life, we’re actually threatening it.”
“Surely our government is regulating this?”
“Our government is too preoccupied with unemployment rates and trade wars that will be obsolete when all is said and done.”
“With the abundance of non-freshwater on the planet, we must have alternatives, right?”
“There are substitutes for almost every resource on this planet. Just look at all the alternative energy sources we’ve created. But there is no alternative for freshwater. Saline water, which is our oceans, large lakes, even groundwater in some areas, is effectively unusable outside of recreational purposes. Desalination efforts have been made to purify that water but they’re costly and can’t be scaled anywhere near the scope needed to make a dent in our issue. When you add in rising global temperatures from fossil fuel-reliance that are melting the world’s glacial ice at a record pace and resulting in saltwater intrusion of our freshwater coastal aquifers, we have a catastrophic issue at-hand.”
“So what’s the bottom line here?”
“The bottom line is the primary source of our survival is at stake.”
“Survival?”
“Oh yes. Our planet has seen five mass extinction events in its history, each the result of an unfathomable natural disaster. I believe the sixth could be manmade.”