For millions, the future is running dry. As our atmosphere's carbon count ticks up and the planet continues to warm, those who live in arid-leaning areas are poised to see not just more frequent droughts, but decades-spanning megadroughts. Recent studies have shown that it's not just possible but likely that the American southwest will see such a megadrought this century. Scientists say that beginning around 2050, we will see "unprecedented drought conditions." California may even be in the early stages of megadrought as we speak.

"The drought could end next year or it could go on and on—we don't know," Peter Gleick, water expert, climatologist, and winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant, recently told me in an email. "What we do know, is that the climate is changing in a way that raises the risks of more extreme events, and that higher temperatures will make droughts worse, just as they are already making this one worse."

We're fairly used to battling typical drought: Conserve water, embrace efficiency, let the lawn go native. Those prescriptions are among the tips now routinely issued in forums like Texas' Drought Survival Kit, published in 2011 when the Lone Star state was in the grip of its own record-breaking dry spell. It's pretty simple thinking: cut back until the rains return.

But how do you survive a megadrought? How might we triumph over Mad Max-levels of wasteland dry, without turning into water-hoarding, Valhalla-worshipping mutants? (It's clearly on our minds; the future-desert film is already a critical and popular hit.) Seriously: How might civilization persist when the H20 is short for five, ten, even twenty or thirty years—the sort of hefty timeframes for the rain-strapped spells likely to become more common as we tumble into the Anthropocene, and the age of the megadrought? That sort of an adjustment is going to require a more fundamental rethinking of how we water human life than just laying off the tap for a bit.