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Geodesic domes - with a possible side effect... Can't hurt to give it a try

Booms are way better than bubbles! Just look at these examples of booms.

Boom
Boom

--we use solar PV here, and have three battery banks. Needing a lot of distilled water every month, we got a commercial solar distiller, which is mounted down by the panel arrays. It's roughly a 3 foot by 5 foot box with a glass top that is sealed to the sides. It worked pretty good for around a year,2-3 gallons a day output, then it stopped working, the glass developed some recurring film that stops the drips from falling into the collection tray. We tried adjusting the angle, etc, opened it up, cleaned the glass several times-nada. It evaporates water great,that part works as advertised, then the water that collects on the glass just sits there until the weight of the droplet causes it to fall right back into the pool of water, instead of sliding down the incline. So we switched to an electric distiller for now, next summer I'm going to make a hot water heater out of the thing and design and build my own distiller. The glass cleaning deal really stumped us, we tried vinegar, windex, you name it, that glass is spotless clean, but within a day or two it gets dirty enough to stop working-just unacceptable. There's probably some sort of application chemical like rain-x or something to use but it's a hassle to keep doing that, it should "just work" for at least a month without having to open it up for additional cleaning. I imagine on a bigger scale it would actually work better as you could have extremely steep sides for the collection efforts.

There's a neat deal that was invented, it uses rotating sails to collect moisture from the air, some places in south america are using it now. this was covered on slashdot before earlier this summer, here's a generic link to a page of links about fog collection. cool stuff.

Hope to see you there.

Pat

Hope to see you there.

Pat

You guys call yourself forward thinking? Sure, if it was something about TiVo, or the latest Quake knockoff, I'm sure you'd be all over it, but try to stretch your minds a little.

Yes, it's cardboard. And as I seem to have to point out to every single person who makes a rudimentary crack about cardboard melting when it gets wet: Milk cartons are made out of cardboard. They hold liquid for weeks at a time! This is not rocket science, people. It's design science.

I have been looking at cardboard as a building material since about 1990. It works. It's cheap. It can be made to withstand many of the stresses of the environment. (My design professor, Harold Cohen, built untreated cardboard domes in the 1960's that sat out for a year in the rain and snow of Southern Illinois. They didn't melt. They worked just fine.)

I've worked with friends to design low-cost emergency shelters for disaster relief and the homeless. And just like all of you, most of them couldn't get past the idea of cardboard melting. So I went with a corrugated plastic material, made just like cardboard, but made from milk-bottle HDPE type-2 plastic. Totally recyclable, and totally waterproof. (Once again, designed to hold milk for weeks, just like the cardboard cartons. :-) ) You can find images of the dome-building party we held at my house in 1998 here and can see some of the results. This dome was about 12' in diameter and 5' high at the center. It was a 1/2 to 1/3 scale model of what we'd deploy to disaster victims or the homeless. The total cost of materials was about US $50.

Standard building materials for housing cost about US $110 per square foot of area covered. This corrugated plastic drops the price down to US $0.50-$1.00 per square foot covered. If you use cardboard, that price falls another order of magnitude to about US $0.05-$0.10 per square foot covered. So you see, it's not just eco-friendly, and it's not just recyclable. It's also up to 1100 times cheaper than doing it the old-fashioned way. So even if it did wear out after 3 months, as one pundit wrote in these comments, you could keep replacing the building for about 400 years for the same cost. Which is far more than a standard school will last.

-Pat

>>I, a taxpayer, should be allowed to exert unilateral control over which public programs are candidates to receive my portion of the tax pie. If I'm an ignorant baboon and I demand that none of my money be used to view bomb making instructions, then I should be allowed to do that. And if I demand that none of my money should go to pro-DMCA biased studies, then I should be able to do that as well.

>>Of course, implementing such a system would be a bookkeeping nightmare. So then we get the all or nothing solution that is so popular in the US' version of a democracy: if enough people raise a stink about something, then no one's tax money is spent to do that thing.

Patrick Salsbury

I know that GE (I think) has a consumer model available article here It's an old article - couldn't tell you where they went with it but I plan on seriously looking into it myself this summer. They create clean, quiet power and are efficient. You may also consider upping your requirements from 1Kw - that is not enough for many devices even if only when they first power up.

The nice thing about pulling out of the atmosphere, is that it's a great automatic distribution system. There's water vapor blowing over most of the planet, most of the time. No need to truck it in or dam up reservoirs when it can be drawn from the air where it's needed.

One other person was asking about environmental impact. If you look at the diagram at the above URL, you'll see a great graphic of the hydrological cycle. There's so much water in constant motion on the planet, that any we took out of one place is being replaced someplace else. And since it's in gaseous form, when you draw it out in one place, you're creating a 'relatively dry' airspace for more water vapor to flow in towards you. Also, given the numbers in that graphic, you'll see that we couldn't really even begin to dent the amount of water in the atmosphere. Most of it falls directly back into the oceans, so there's plenty we could get from nature's own desalination process.

I also run a mailing list devoted to discussion of water topics like these. You can find info about it (and lots of other neat stuff) at the Reality Sculptors website.

Patrick Salsbury

The nice thing about pulling out of the atmosphere, is that it's a great automatic distribution system. There's water vapor blowing over most of the planet, most of the time. No need to truck it in or dam up reservoirs when it can be drawn from the air where it's needed.

One other person was asking about environmental impact. If you look at the diagram at the above URL, you'll see a great graphic of the hydrological cycle. There's so much water in constant motion on the planet, that any we took out of one place is being replaced someplace else. And since it's in gaseous form, when you draw it out in one place, you're creating a 'relatively dry' airspace for more water vapor to flow in towards you. Also, given the numbers in that graphic, you'll see that we couldn't really even begin to dent the amount of water in the atmosphere. Most of it falls directly back into the oceans, so there's plenty we could get from nature's own desalination process.

I also run a mailing list devoted to discussion of water topics like these. You can find info about it (and lots of other neat stuff) at the Reality Sculptors website.

Patrick Salsbury

Also, I run a mailing list called "clean-water", where we discuss things like fog collection, condensing, filtration and other ways to address water shortages around the world. All interested parties are welcome to join.

Subscription info is here.

Hope to see some of you on the list!

Pat

Also, I run a mailing list called "clean-water", where we discuss things like fog collection, condensing, filtration and other ways to address water shortages around the world. All interested parties are welcome to join.

Subscription info is here.

Hope to see some of you on the list!

Pat

We've got a bunch of mailing lists, and can start a bunch more for specific projects such as code development, etc. If you're interested in helping us hash out an opensource OS or are just interested in finding out more about these projects, please join us.

Patrick Salsbury

We've got a bunch of mailing lists, and can start a bunch more for specific projects such as code development, etc. If you're interested in helping us hash out an opensource OS or are just interested in finding out more about these projects, please join us.

Patrick Salsbury

• http://www.ballard.com/ Stationary fuel cells (for your house)
• http://www.manhattsci.com/ Micro fuel cells (for your cell phone/PDA)
• http://www.plugpower.com/home.cfm More home fuel cells
• http://reality.sculptors.com/lists.html Fuel cell discussion list

Anything that gets people to spend less time watching TV is a good thing. Check out this powerful anti-TV "essay".

I'm surprised as well that the UN is just figuring this out. About 10 years ago, as I began studying population and global life-support issues, I discovered that there is a direct (and very repeatable) corellation between the raising of living standards and the automatic lowering of birthrate.

As noted by many other folks here, this seems to be a no-brainer when you look at industrial societies vs. agricultural ones. I won't repeat their points here, just read the above.

I will say, though, that something as simple as running an electric power-line into a village will begin to affect the living standard (bringing power, heat, light, communications, cooking abilities, appliances, and all the other stuff we take for granted in industrial societies) and thus begin to lower the birthrate. Given our newer technologies of solar cells, fuel cells, and other off-the-grid power and wireless communications systems, we no longer even need the wire.

If you're interested in this topic, and want to help us figure out ways of raising the living standards of people by finding ways to bring them power, water, shelter, local hydroponic food production, etc., then please check out the Reality Sculptors Project and join some of the mailing lists there. We're always happy to have more sharp minds focused on these issues.

If you're into geodesic domes, Bucky Fuller, Design Science, floating cities, fuel-cells, airships, futurism, and doing-more-with-less, this might be the place for you. :-)

Patrick Salsbury