Every day, it seems that another dire report about some unavoidable catastrophe in the near future comes along. This is nothing new, sure, like those occasional stray Armageddon-type asteroid reports, but what I'm referring to are reports like these:

The World Water Development Report has found the earth faces a double-whammy. Clean water supplies are on the decline while demand is growing dramatically at an unsustainable rate. By 2023, the report predicts that every person on the planet can expect their personal allocation of fresh water to have declined by a third. The impact will be worst for developing nations where clean water is already in critically short supply.

I'm wary of these for two reasons: One, they have a Chicken Little quality to the wording that has a way of not coming true (remember the forecasts in the seventies about oil supplies running out by now?), and this sort of attention-grabbing speculation is a good way for certain groups to make the news. Not that their concerns have no merit; we've known about the water problem for decades or more. But unfortunately, perhaps as a side-effect of the "impartial" news style we've evolved over the years, the reports rarely give any examples of what we, the readers, can do to head-off the problem.

Back when I was op/ed page editor at The Daily Iowan, that was one of the things I insisted my editorial writers do when they wrote about things like this: Give us something simple we can contribute, but make it simple. In this era of international terrorism and governments on the brink of war, it's enough to worry about stray nukes and al-Qaeda, to time your shower length may seem silly, though not impossible.

Still, what really concerns me about the apparent increasing frequency of these reports is that all the dates seem to converge about the same time: somewhere around 2030-2050, we're going to have a lot of massive problems on our hands. One article I read in Esquire says that around that time, given certain mathematical models of the rate of increasing computer power, a computer will have achieved sentience:

"The Singularity" occurs in that moment when computers become intelligent enough to upgrade themselves. Self-programming computers will have, argues Vinge, a learning curve that points straight up. In a very short time they will become transcendently intelligent and remodel civilization as they please. We might need to make a few adjustments.

Great. So now not only will we not have any water to drink, but we also have to worry about killer androids, too.