Quite an interesting perspective on scarcity. I had no idea it took so much water to produce the various products that we take for granted everyday! After reading that I'm going to be much more conscious of how much water I waste.

I think efficiency is the major overall technological trend of our day. There are more than enough natural resources for everyone, we just need to make use of them in more efficient ways and let less go to waste. I see this trend in human behavioral patterns too. At work, we are constantly being asked to do more with less. Recently my team was merged with several other teams, with the idea of using common infrastructure to come up with synergies across business units and eliminate unnecessary duplication of labor. It's difficult to imagine what life will be like in a couple hundred years, but one thing I am certain of is that it will make much better use of available resources!

I also love the idea of mining asteroids for resources. Just imagine what will happen to the price of precious metals when the first space mining companies start becoming successful! I'm predicting a massive worldwide gold crash; space mining will completely redefine how people think about scarcity of metals.