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Creating Water from Thin Air
Iphtashu Fitz writes "In order to provide the U.S. Military with water in places like Iraq, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave millions of dollars in research funding to companies like LexCarb and Sciperio to try to extract water from the air. Amazingly, a company that DARPA didn't fund, Aqua Sciences, beat them all to the punch by developing a machine that can extract up to 600 gallons of water a day from thin air even in locations like arid deserts. The 20 foot machine does this without using or producing toxic materials or byproducts. The CEO of Aqua Sciences declined to elaborate on how the machine works, but said it is based on the natural process by which salt absorbs water."
I recall reading an article about ancient rock mounds, where the rocks were loosely lumped with plenty of space in between. Air filtered through and encountered the cool rock faces of the interior of the mound. Water condensed on the interior rock faces and trickled out the bottom. I'll see if I can find a link.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
at my seitch.
Sincerely,
Muad'Dib
...this when they read this article? ;-)
I'm sure they'll be interested.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
However the article itself was about as descriptive of technology as Frank Herbert's novels. Here is a fun quote.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
just add water! I keed, I keed.
Just as long as the superconductors you use on your condensors are not vulnerable to a puppeteer plague.
If that happens its going to take a long time before Louis shows up.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
salt absorbtion of water and distillation of the salty water?
I guess the telling would be to see how may gallons of water it can produce while floating on a fresh water lake, and on teh salty sea.
Anyone heard of Tatooine's moisture farmers?
I thought so.
(sorry, it was just too obivious)
What, you're shocked that all the government funded plodders were out done by a Capitalist independent? Government is very poor at creation and is typically very poor at selecting future winners in the technology race. That's why government should be a consumer of technology rather than a producer of the same.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
So the government failed to fund a company who promised unbelievable results with no byproducts while not supplying any details? I must say, I'm actually proud of them. Glad to see tax dollars aren't being wasted on Vaporware
Is there a button to switch it from 'water' to 'beer?'
This sound like a Windtrap to anyone else. I love it when something I read about in a sci-fi book 20 years ago comes to life in a practical application.
Fear is the mind killer...
Same thing happens on my windows in the winter.
KFG
I was thinking of Dune myself. Frank Herbert's notion that man could survive with such limited water supplies apparently wasn't entirely fantastical. However, IIRC no such device was used in the series. Instead, the Fremen relied on farming the naturally forming dew of the planet. Personally, after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, I wonder why Herbert never thought of having some Fremen just crash a few comets into the planet to at least provide some selected portion of it with water. Of course, that would have killed off all the sandworms.
Tragically, according to http://amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/002-1718624-80528 08?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=big+secre ts&Go.x=14&Go.y=9&Go=Go
the KFC secret sauce is salt, pepper and MSG.
Besides, who wants 600 gallons of salt water?
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
The difference is that this will operate down to 14% humidity. So in other words, you could stick it in the desert and keep the troops watered.
You could distribute it to villages with bad water sources.
In fact... this thing could be a pretty big deal if it's cheap enough to produce.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Sounds like they probably use a hydroscopic compound such as calcium chloride and then you some type of ion replacement to recover the water (precipitate calcium metal and some other non-soluable salt, such as Fe(III)Cl.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Asked to clarify how it worked, the CEO noted- "Just add water, and in a few minutes it'll be ready!".
--Q
Actually, what I really need is a quicker brain so I won't have to google for the quote, taking valuable time, allowing a dozen other slashdotters to post the same lame joke. Sorry everybody.
sucking all the moisture out of the environment will have no impact on the eco system, right?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If this technology really works as well as is advertised, how bout the government does something with it a bit more productive than sending a bunch to the army? Like maybe buying thousands of these things and shipping them to many of the different places in the world where a lack access to fresh water is one of the most pressing health concerns of millions of people.
It's good that our soldiers are out in the middle east doing their jobs, and they deserve fresh water too. But seeing the general anger towards the US that's prevelant in so much of the world right now, actually helping people with something like this would generate tremendous good will. It'd probably be a lot cheaper than our wars are as well.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
600 gallons of water a day? Impressive.
.050 kg/m^3. 600 gallons of water is (roughly) 2200 litres, or 2200 kilograms. That means it's using 44000 cubic meters of air.
Absolute humidity is measured in kilograms per cubic meter. A number pulled equally out of my ass and google as a possible ballpark typical one is
IANAAS, so I don't have any idea what that translates into real-world. Would this thing need a fan?
groupthink: It's good for self-esteem.
Won't extracting water from the air decrease the humidity even further, producing an ever DRIER climate?
...just add water, and you've got water! That reminded me of the original Space Quest. The survival kit you get in that game has a can of dehydrated water. Although if you actually examine the can, it says it contains hydrogen, which becomes water when mixed with air. Since the game was intended more or less as comedy, they didn't take into account that hydrogen + oxygen = water is a rather exothermic reaction, it burns hot and releases a lot of heat, and the water that is produced is produced as steam. Producing water from "thin air" is just condensation. People have been condensing water vapor from the air (even in desert regions) for a very long time now, this is hardly anything new. At most, it's merely an increase in efficiency.
Here we are, as promised. About a third of the way down the page. Ignore the Reichian weirdness, the wells were built near the ancient Byzantine city of Feodosiya. There were 13 large conical tumuli of stones, each about 10,000 feet square and 30-40 feet tall, on hilltops. Russian engineer Friedrich Zibold calculated they would each produce more than 500 gallons daily. These theories have been disputed by some archeologists (who don't seem to like it when engineers discover cool archeological stuff and make up theories about it) but the mounds do all have numerous terra-cotta pipes around the base, presumeably to collect the run off
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Some good Vaporware!
Now I just need a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators. Oh sorry, I thought every comment was supposed to have that joke in it.
Maybe it was a wet rock?
Everybody is thinking about Dune, so here's what a stillsuit does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stillsuit
By the way, download the full game with speech (legal abandonware) at http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?gameid=345
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
this is coming from an australian company, seeing as australia is both the most arid continent and largest desert island in the world.
You shall know him by his Sig
It's pretty much a reusable desiccant - and in the best case (probably using reverse osmosis) the energy cost will be about an order of magnitude worse than desalinization plants. It even says in the article that the cost is 30 cents a gallon (which is probably highly optimistic and certainly cannot be verified without full disclosure from the company). At 30 cents a gallon (or perhaps 3 dollars a gallon when you're operating it in field conditions) you could forget about serving any sort of civilian market, and even for military use it would be quite expensive.
The DARPA funded companies did not have the same motivation as the other one. It is in their best interest to keep making slow progress and asking for more money everytime they have a little breakthrough. The successful company had no such money train. It was in their best interest to actually PRODUCE RESULTS in order to patent, market, and sell the technolohy. Funny how that works huh?
Finkployd
Quote from the article: "It seems like it's a cheaper alternative to trucking in bottled water, which has a shelf life," said Rowe, who described himself as a fiscal hawk.
Wow, according to this guy, water can spoil. I'll be! >
has posted anything about moisture vaporators.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I abuse commas, I cannot help myself.
Yet further down
Anybody with half a brain knows that there has to be some humidity in the air in order to extract water. Wait, that explains it.
While it is an accomplishment to reduce the humidity requirement, it doe not eliminate it. Indeed given their claim of up to 600 gal/day I'd say that at the minimum required humidity of 14%, it is possible that they may require far more of them than is talked about. A key factor is how rapidly that output drops when the humidity levels drop. if it porduces 600 gal/day at optimum humidity levels, it may only put out say 10 gal/day. If that were the case you could not rely on this for troop support in such areas. A supplemental, sure.
Depending on the size and maintenance requirements, as well as the phsyical inputs other than air, it may not be cost effective to use these in more arid regions. Now, places like the southern US they would be quite useful.
What I'd like to know is the size and power requirements. Something like this could be quite useful in high-rise buildings. Pumping water to the upper levels requires a significant amount of power. If instead we could put a few of these on tops of buildings and use them to bring water down, we might see a net win in terms of supply and energy usage. Imagine places like Phoenix or Las Vegas.
Pheonix has an average daily humidity of about 55% IIRC. Thus it would stand to reason that these units could pump out their maximum output. Depending on their size and power requirements, several of these atop an office building in Phoenix could produce several thousand gallons per building. As office buildings their water requirements might be low enough to satisfy with these units. They would have the further advantage of dehumidifying the hot air of Phoenix, thus possibly resulting in a slight cooling load reduction.
Even small residential units could be tremendously benefited. The average person requires 125 gal/day. Thus one of these could supply the water needs (not counting grass lawns) of a family of four in Phoenix. If the house is designed with greywater and systems for landscaping purposes it is possible that one of these could fully supply the average water requirement of a family of four in Phoenix. Which leads to the question
Anyone from Phoneix care to share how much you pay for water? If you've got a spouse and a pair of kids, and this unit eliminated your water usage bill (there would still be sewage), how much would it save you per year?
40,000 of these units in Phoenix would drop the summer daily demand for water by 24Mgal/day, or 5-12% depending on the season (Summer to Winter).
Essentially, if this proved cost effective then the more arid parts of the country might be able to make large savings on their infrastructure and supply costs. Which would be yet another miltary requested technology applied to positive civilian use.
The next question is: does it scale up and down? Can it be scaled down to be an effective one-person supply? Do larger units demonstrate a better-than-linear increase in water production?
Combine this with greywater systems, solar thermal heating (water and home), and appropriate landscaping and we would be a long ways toward a more sustainable system - without major changes and reductions to our standard of living.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
From Aqua Sciences's website:-
Machines may be powered by electricity or a self-contained diesel generator and are environmentally friendly due to lower energy requirements and no harmful or toxic by-products.
So it's not, in fact, "no by products", it's "low by products". Although how Diesel emissions can be considered non-toxic is beyond me.
1/4 the country was swampland before Saddam screwed that up, another quarter is snowy mountains, and two of the mideast's biggest rivers flow right through the place, although Turkey's in the process of gobbling those up.
If the damn fools would stop blowing up their own water and power plants, they'd have plenty of water.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Historically the government has been a great catalyst of techology inovation and improvements."
True. They make great contributions, using other people's money, aquired by force or the threat of force, and spent very wastefully. But when you can tax who cares about efficiency?
The 20 foot machine does this without using or producing toxic materials or byproducts.
So does my AC. Not 300 gallons though, but if it were 20 feet long and used a few hundred lilowatts it might.
Several systems on the market can create water through condensation, but the process requires a high level of humidity.
Or a high level of wattage? TFA is completely absent on details about how it works.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
It sucks the moisture out of the air, then you heat it up and evaporate the water, leaving the salts behind to be reused.
The great thing about is, all you need is a heat source. You can either burn fuel, or use waste heat coming off a turbine, or even use solar energy -- you need temperatures above boiling, but not too much higher.
This is the same stuff they use for solar-powered heat pumps, except there they use a closed loop system, and evaporate the water at low pressure to get air conditioning.
Government is very poor at creation and is typically very poor at selecting future winners in the technology race.
See also the Internet you're using to post your comment. Oh wait, DARPA created that, nevermind.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
1) Water from plants is always drinkable. I'm talking about water from the root system, not some stagnant water you could slurp out of a recess between branches. The easiest way is to take a large trash bag, grab a cluster of branches and put the bag around them (make sure the open end of the trash bag is tightly sealed to prevent air from going into the enclosed bunch). It forces the tree to "sweat" water from its root system. After about 24 hours you can slit the bottom of the bag and drain it into a nalgene bottle. You can only do one group of branches per 24 hour period, so you need to use different trees to gather water. I tried it out when I was in Eastern Oregon (which, for all intents and purposes, is an inland desert) and averaged about 1 liter of water per 24 hours. I had 6 trash bags that I normally have in my hiking ruck, so I could feasibly harvest 6 liters per day if I was SOL somewhere.
2) A cluster of birch trees usually means there's water underground.
3) Any multi-celled berry (ie: raspberry) is edible.
Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool shit, and informative. :)
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
A lot of "far fetched" things in the bible are now explained; even the parting of the red sea (tsunami caused by the volcano that wiped out the Minoans, according to an art history class I took).
Of course, having physical explanations kinda takes some of the magic out.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Now hope they will not lock-down the technology for them exclusively.
I think you can see some in the background of this picture.
p ics/normal_Luke_tatooine.jpg
http://www.pilvikaupunki.net/galleria/albums/user
From KFC.com:
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
A solar still produces water in the desert and uses no external energy source other than sunlight (there is plent of that in the desert)
Obi Wan: "These aren't the vaporators you're lookong for."
Dumb soldier: "These aren't the vaporators we're lookong for. Move along."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Ahhhhh! Refreshing...
I have to think at some point, dehydrating the air in an already arid region is going to have negative effects on the local climate. Maybe not so bad if you are temporarily supporting a mobile, transient military force, but if you start relying on them to support stationary civilian populations, it could be one of those things that's really great in the short-term, with a cost that comes in kicks you in the tail down the line.
I am too TGIF brain fried to run through Magnus-Tetens calculations today, but at 30cents/gallon--or $3 as you probably correctly guesstimate--this might be even less efficient than cooling a hunk of metal and blowing cool air over it.
It sounds more like they created a substance that uses intermolecular forces to have a high attraction to water (like salt or any other desiccant). The secret is making it so that under a specific condition these water molecules can be released again (heat, pressure, etc). Then possibly combined it with standard evaporation methods through compression and cooling (standard dehumidifier).
So in all they probably just found, or dynamically adjust, the 'sweet spot' between the two methods to produce the most amount of water with the least power.
This would be quite sweet to setup an arrangement of this machine, fed to a water to hydrogen gas converter, fed to an intake and into a combustion chamber... voila... instant fuel while driving ;)
:P
It's unfortunate that this will not happen because fag oil companies and big money car companys would lose out in the long run...
Great idea, another strike against the bullcrap politics and another strike against mankind... I guess the "communist" manifesto saying man is "innately good" just got slapped in the face and proven wrong.... again
of course for war. The government id interested, will provide the most profit. Then the device will gte known talked about and spread.
It's a good stratagy.
Assuming this magic device works.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Two things.
1: Water does have a shelf life, which is why if you're storing it for long periods you have to add stabilizers.
2: The bottles can leach into the water over time, and some plastic bottles are set up so that they will begin to bio-degrade in a couple years, hence the date stamped on each bottle when you buy them.
My mom says I'm cool.
Where is this thing??? Did they shoot these kids and hide their bodies like they did with the guy what invented the car that runs on water?
It's called an air conditioner. The problem is that it takes quite a bit of energy to run.
There's no way of avoiding that without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
Yeah, they use a different technique, but it's kinda the same thing. I just thought it was interesting that people thousands of years ago had techniques for getting water out of air. And I knew everyone else was going to be yelling "Arakis!" and "Tatooine!" so I thought I would put out an example from the real world.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
it probably runs on a fuel called hydrogen.
WTF what a bunch of assholes
I want my damn tax money back.
30 bucks a gallon is bullshit.
If it really cost that much then a freakin pepsi would be $75 in bagdad.
Besides, a recipe isn't just ingredients, but also the process, which can be equally important. Think about wine: "Ingredients: grapes."
Now i can set up that moisture farm on ta.............. These aren't the droids your looking for. OH SNAP My life just flashed before my eyes in a 6 part trilogy. (Yes a trilogy)
You mad
Now thats Slashdot paranoia. :p
Quack, quack.
What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
Bruce
The Moisture Farms of Tatooine totally won't be able to handle the increased competition.
The difference is that this will operate down to 14% humidity. So in other words, you could stick it in the desert and keep the troops watered.
It sounds to me like a piece of technology with the capability of sucking the desert completely dry.
1. Troops show up.
2. Water extraction system installed.
3. Almost ALL humidity sucked out of the air.
4. Every living thing in the desert wilts and dies.
Has there been an environmental impact assessment done on this yet?
But, does it understand the binary language of other moisture vaporators. This will be crucial when we need to place them in critical locations. Also will these operate similar to binary load lifters which from what I hear are easy to program.
what did we tell you about trolling the forums?
Quack, quack.
That would have to be a massive evaporator to actually cause an effect on the local climate. In the desert regions of the US though like Phoenix, the urbanization of the desert has actually added to the relative humidity via increased plants and the watering of them. The AC units do not have a noticeable affect however.
Remember most of that water is returned directly to the environment via sweating and urination.
I'm not not licking toads.
This probably will never be a large scale product, but consider what would happen if large amounts of water vapor are extracted from the air.
Of course, if the hydrogen economy ever comes to pass these things might become a necessity.
We are all bad Countries. This could be said of any of us. Isreal certainly has science, unfortunately a lot of is being used for defence contracts.
Quack, quack.
A mechanical refrigeration cooik can extract moisture from the air down to less than 1% relative humidity. All you have to do is cool the air to below the local dewpoint, and water (or ice) will condense from the coil. Then you just capture it before a blast of warm air re-evaporates it.
Really this is Thermo 1. It isn't a question of can it be done, it is a question of diminishing returns. It takes a lot of energy to wring a little moisture out of dry air. Similarly, it would take a lot of energy to wring the moisture out of any dessicants or salts that have absorbed any moisture.
This thing looks a lot like some kind of Gas absorption cooler turned inside out somehow. They work, but dammed if I can follow the process. Chances are those same villages could have had one running on propane for years. Now they'll have a different version making water for them.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
To think what these could do for people in third world countries.
So I guess I'm with you then.
Quack, quack.
'truely' is spelled 'truly', champ.
$30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
All the Alton Brown geeks in the house should have perked up their ears when they read that. Salt is hydroscopic; it attracts water. Sugar is also hydroscopic, but salt is much cheaper (especially if you don't need food-grade salt).
There are two ways salt is harvested by humans: evaporation and mining.
I can see using salt to grab the moisture in the air present in the pre-dawn skies, but I don't rightly know how to make the salt give it back up. I assume they just cook the rocks and capture the steam. Salt, being a rock, can be heated lots of times before degrading.
I imagine a process like this would produce fairly clean water.
Give up for Food Science! Hell ya!
Having some old dude and a bunch of his fleeing kin at the exact right spot just as tsunami drains enough water to create a land bridge would be plenty magical I think.
Of course, there's always the chance as the verbal history was passed down, tellers embellished a bit to impress the kids better.
Maybe it was only red spray paint from PETA after they got mad at Moses for breaking the pet rock.
Yes, he did - but why did he have to use TUBES?
From the article:
...
"It was very interesting to see the technology in action and learn about its possible implementation in natural disasters," said Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., a Republican from Florida whose hurricane-prone district includes Fort Lauderdale.
"It was delicious," Shaw said.
I'm sorry, but when did politicians start eating machines, and why didn't I get the memo?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
This is awesome. When will they come out with 'still suits?
One of the problems which has dogged airships from day 1 is the inability to replace the weight of burned fuel. There's a couple ways you can deal with this problem, but none of them are ideal. Modern blimps and airships are actually heavier than air, relying on lift from engine pods to get the airship in the air. As they burn fuel they get lighter, but they're never actually "lighter than air". Early airships were much too large for this strategy especially since engine technology was far less advanced.
The most successful airship in history, the Graf Zeppelin, used a gas called Blau Gas to power its engines. Blau Gas is just a mixture of propane and hydrogen that weighs the same as air, so when you burn it and the gas volume is replaced by air of the same weight you don't have any buoyancy problems. Graf Zeppelin used hydrogen, which is relatively cheap, for its lifting gas. If it became too light they could vent enough hydrogen to restore neutral buoyancy.
But this scheme wasn't very efficient, from an engineering perspective. Every cubic meter of fuel was a cubic meter that couldn't be used for lift. Also, as they designed the Hindenburg they were concerned about safety, so they decided the Hindenburg would be filled with helium instead of hydrogen. Since heliem is about 10% less efficient as a lifting gas, Zeppelin engineers decided they just couldn't live with Blau Gas. Also, Blau Gas has the same safety drawbacks as hydrogen. Helium is much more expensive than hydrogen, so if the company was to be profitable there was no way they could just vent helium when the ship was too light. So if they were to use diesel fuel exclusively in the Hindenburg, they needed a way to add weight to the airship in flight.
The solution was to remove water from the air and use it as ballast to replace the now-missing diesel fuel. The system they designed used a silica gel, the same stuff that comes in a little packet labeled "DO NOT EAT" when you buy a pair of shoes. Ambient air was blown over the gel, which is highly water absorbent. The gel was then heated using waste engine heat to produce water vapor, which was collected in a condenser. Eventually they decided to use the diesel exhaust (which is apparently very humid) instead of ambient air. This was 70 years ago.
Those in the ancient Middle East did something similar with animal skins. They would simply set them out at night, and in the morning wring out the vast amount of dew that had collected.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Of course, there's always the chance as the verbal history was passed down, tellers embellished a bit to impress the kids better.
"In my day, we not only had to walk uphill both ways to school, we had to part the seas to do it!"
"You parted the seas?! Lucky bastard! We had to hold breath and walk along the bottom..."
"Oh yes. Well, at least you were walking. We had to outrun the whole Egyptian army.. And wander in the desert for forty days."
"Days? We had to wander for forty weeks!"
"Well I say days, it was really forty years. But we were tough, it just seemed like days to us..."
-- Alastair
Woot my dreams of being a moisture farmer in the desert finally being realized lol
Yep. Star Wars, the story of a poor kid on Arakkis who grew up and went to Trantor. But movies and TV series routinely rip off whatever they can, tweaking it just enough to (usually) avoid lawsuits.
Not to say that science fiction (and other) writers don't rip off too, but they're usually much better at filing off the serial numbers, and taking from totally different genres (as well as being long since in the public domain). Asimov's inspiration for the Foundation Trilogy (back when it was a trilogy) was, loosely speaking, "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire". Forbidden Planet was loosely based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (and of course Star Trek ripped off a lot from Forbidden Planet). And so on.
(In fact Hollywood is often closer to the original when they rip something off than they are when they buy the property and make a movie from it. Joke. Joke.)
-- Alastair
Yeah, that's why it's more likely to be the result of "wind setdown" and the resulting bore when the wind failed. The water being pushed back to expose a path would have been a reasonably common event. If you were a local, you'd know it would be a dangerous path to use, but if you were desperate to escape it might have seemed worth the risk.
There's some interesting theories, including this one, here. http://www.europhysicsnews.com/full/33/article6.pd f#search=%22part%20the%20seas%20moses%20science%22
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Water out of thin air? I'm not impressed. Every morning when I leave for work I need to wipe off the windshields of my car as there is so much water on it without any rain happening. Bought the dang thing to get from point A to point B and it's always producing water. I'll bet if we parked it into a desert an oasis would form!
It's a fucking miracle! The laws of science aren't supposed to allow it!
All roads, of course, led to Trantor (Rome). I don't think that Asimov hid his borrowing from history - note that any author generally freely borrows from history, past or present (reality). Borrowing so heavily from another author's works, on the other hand, is another matter IMHO.
> A lot of "far fetched" things in the bible are now explained
No, they're not.
>; even the parting of the red sea (tsunami caused by the volcano that
> wiped out the Minoans, according to an art history class I took).
Especially not that one. A tsunami wouldn't part the sea.
> Of course, having physical explanations kinda takes some of the magic out.
You mean `utterly disproves the medieval nonsense`? I guess it does.
You seem a bit touchy. I don't think he's pushing intelligent design. And the Bible was written well before medieval times.
I'm guessing one of these things would be invaluable in many of the African countries. But as mentioned by the article they are unlikely to ever get there because the US government wants to use them for war purposes and won't disclose the methods or technology involved. Once again bringing democracy(anarchy) to Iraq on TV will come before stopping millions from dying of thirst and contaminated drinking water.
Slashdot is powered by your submission.
Either the story is made up, or it's not.
If it's one of the 1st 2 then OK. Maybe they crossed the Red Sea in boats and told it different. There is independent (I.e. None biblical) evidence of a Jewish slave nation in Egypt.
As for the crossing story. It has 2 parts. Not only did the Red sea open up so the Jews could walk through, it also closed behind them and drowned the Egyptian army. Now follow me....
To let through whole families with luggage and Livestock and infants and old people the see would have had to part pretty wide and stay open for a long time. How fast can you Cary grandma?
To drown an army, the watter would have had to come in real hard or cover them deep.
That combination rules out all the common natural explanations. Tsunamis are too fast, and if Wind moves enough watter those families couldn't walk through that Hurricane, Take it from a guy who has been outside in a storm far too puny to do that (Hurricane Gilbert at Category 3 in Jamaica 1988)
The possibilities:
1. This was some still unknown phenomenon,
2. This was straight Devinne intervention
3. This was Alien Intervention (The old God is ET concept)
4. Moses and his palls cooked up a really cool story.
Not to worry. When we die, some of us will get to ask people who were there at the time how it actually happened.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Obviously you've never been by a fountain on a hot day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I was actually planning to post a joke comment about the environmental dangers of "stealing" water from mother nature. Ah well, it wouldn't have been funny, anyway...
- Francis Ocoma
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Al Gore Created the Internet! Everybody knows that.
And of course, "Al Gore" is really a prototype DARPA-funded killbot that was repurposed for peaceful use. Thus, DARPA created the internet. QED.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Easier than this would just be to make a bucket still. (Second item down on the page.)
No idea how many times you'd need to run seawater through it in order to produce something potable, but it's dead simple to set up. It requires two buckets, one which will fit inside the other, a piece of clear plastic sheeting, a bungee cord or duct tape, and two clean rocks or other heavy objects. Basically you put the small bucket inside the large bucket, and put the clean rock in the bottom of the small bucket to keep it from floating. Then put seawater into the large bucket (around the outside of the small bucket). Then put the clear plastic sheeting over the top, and secure it tightly with the bungee cord. Place the small rock in the center, to create a dimple. Place the whole apparatus in the sun. In theory, the sun causes the water in the seawater to boil/evaporate, which then condenses against the top, runs towards the center, and drips down into the small bucket.
You can do similar things if you are in an area that gets warm during the day and cool at night. It's really just developing any sort of temperature differential that's key.
I've never tried making a bucket still, but I've seen the diagram in various survival manuals; I think the idea is that you can adapt it to use basically any moist plant product instead of seawater (e.g., in the desert you could use cactus chunks or something).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I guess you did not really read the article. It said that the cost will be reduced from $30 from flying it in, to 30 cents from their on location system. True, we could argue that neither one of us have seen that to be true, but I would not want to be that arse.
They won the contracts after a demo and I'm sure they would not want their customer to read in the news how it could be lower than they are actually paying. It would look like they had just been had, and no doubt could put the whole contract at risk.
If the military IS flying it in at $30, don't you think that shows that it's not too cost prohibitive? And that ANY cost below that is an improvement? Let's see $30 vs $0.30...
The quote reminds me of my younger years when I had to... um... quickly dry things I grew before they rotted.
Take a tupperware container. Wedge two layers of chicken wire, with a few inches between the bottom, middle, and top. On the bottom layer of wire
put a cotton cloth with Damp Rid(Potassium Chloride). Put the items you want to dehydrate on the top layer. Seal up. The salt will leech the water out and
when it saturates, dump it at the bottom of the container.
So given a big enough contraption to hold enough salt with a large enough surface area, a way to move enough air over it(fan), and a way to get the water out and stored(pump), could you
collect 600 gallons of a water a day in a desert?
I have here a copy of a book entitled "The Inventions of Daedalus", which reprints the column of the same name by David E. H. Jones from New Scientist magazine. This column would propose unusual inventions, generally based upon sound scientific principles and seeming entirely reasonable except for their total absurdity. Previous proposals include a scheme for slaughter-free meat production by harvesting reptile tails which then regenerate; a weapon called "Shattergas" causing sudden and catastrophic corrosion of militarily important metals and plastics; and an addictive birth control pill which the user would never forget to take.
Anyway, it includes a column dated May 25, 1978 entitled "The Desert Waterer" in which "Daedalus" proposes just such a device, whereby moisture is collected from the air by means of a hygroscopic liquid. The water can then be extruded through a semi-permeable membrane if the liquid is under sufficient pressure. This can be accomplished simply by placing the liquid in a tall column; moisture enters at the top and the hydrostatic pressure at the bottom allows recovery. Daedalus then considers some convenient liquids for the purpose. Sulfuric acid is readily available in industrial quantities but would need a column 2400 meters high, which is somewhat awkward. Invert sugar syrup has a higher molecular weight and would require a column merely 720 meters high, as well as being nontoxic, and even edible in case of an emergency. Best of all, he says, is a product called "Carbowax", for which a column of only 50 meters would suffice.
The firm in charge of this present project has a suspiciously similar name, so perhaps they have just created a better Carbowax.
Daedalus, in the book, cites a number of cases where an invention from the column has become the subject of serious research. So this is just one more example...
if you really RTFA, then you would have also noticed the figure about $30 a gallon to supply troops in Iraq and the middle east.
There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
"Oh yes. Well, at least you were walking. We had to outrun the whole Egyptian army.. And wander in the desert for forty days."
When I was a kid, we didn't have feet!
> You seem a bit touchy.
When someone points out my mistakes they're doing me a favour - I never accuse them of being touchy.
No-one mentioned `intelligent design`, so I'm not sure where that came from.
Why do you think the DoD funded this? They want to keep those Arab wannabe jedis down on the farm.
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He's getting karma-wacked for a reasonable comment because of Star Wars fanboys.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
That is a ridiculously small number. For the US army in Iraq, you're probably talking about 10s of millions of gallons per day.
Most of which is in places with excess moisture (like over the oceans, lakes, tundra, etc), rather than evenly distributed around the globe. The deserts have far less than their fair share of this moisture.
And removing perhaps just 5% of the moisture in an area could have a dramatic impact, as the higher pressure could cause stronger winds. Though, since much of this water will be sweated right back out to the atmosphere, I have no idea what kind of an impact to really expect.
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Evaporation is adding water to the atmosphere. Condensation is removing it.
Because the water they are using was pumped up from underground...
I don't know about you, but I don't generally go around urinating on the ground. Usually it's flushed and either put underground where it can't escape for hundreds of years, or travels off to some distance river, lake, or ocean.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
on Arrakis I guess not wanting to contaminate the spice worms.
No such considerations were afforded to Iraq which at most has to offer oil thought
safe from contamination. Most of the aftermath to the effects of exposure to the
radioactive metal dust from depleted uranium shells becoming obvious now, such as
cancers in adults, malformed children missing limbs and in some cases babies born
without brains... and on top of that thousands of gallons of chemical warfare
agents and a couple of million tons of fallout from major oil wells that burned for
weeks to months.
Right now it would probably be healthier to drink out of a puddle in downwind Nevada
than whatever water they could extract in Iraq.
Here's a movie you might want to watch that shows you just what a contaminated mess
our Beloved Leader left in Iraq:
http://www.beyondtreason.com/
It has a nice interview in there with Dr. Doug Rokke the former director of the Army
Depleted Uranium Project. Watch him cry in shame in front of the camera.
At the end be sure to watch the interview with Sgt Bob Jones, who came down with the
Gulf War syndrome and listen to how he describes the ultimate treatment they came up with:
A field trip to Arlington cemetary and telling him and his family to "learn to cope".
from the atmosphere were used all the way through the series, that's what the windtraps were.
Tech Public Policy stuff
... the atmosphere contains 1.12E17 gallons ...
...
That is a ridiculously small number
1.12E17 means 1.12 * 10 ^ 17. That's 112,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. Roughly 10,000,000 gallons for every person on the planet.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
It's only $30/gal because the US military makes bad decision after bad decision. Overpaying for the transport planes is 1, flying in bulky supplies or staying in a base where you can't truck or ship in supplies is 2, and relying on contractors like Halliburton makes for 3 strikes.
I wonder how much rich Iraqis pay for their clean water?
no no .. it was a book called "Dune'
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
2220 litres a day at 8 cents a litre is very interesting already to many drought striken towns in Australia.
I wish there were more details. How much energy does it use? Is there scope for price reductions? What would the water cost be be if the energy were supplied from the Grid?
Actually I was referring to the "300 gallons a day". I assumed that would be clear from the following sentence.
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Oops! Indeed it is clear. I wasn't paying attention. Too little sleep lately.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
If Christ turn straw into pot, instead of water into wine, we'd all be smoking up a communion! -Bauer
Because he didn't want for it to be boring like the Mars trilogy crap. He was a very intellegent author who wanted to create a realistic alternate universe to the extent very much like Tolkien did. Above all he was an ecologist who respected the wonders of nature and reality over the humanistic technobabble you get in most so-called 'scifi'. Human kind isn't destined for the starts - its still just a bunch of monkeys with or without the fancy toys. The Bene Gesserit saw this and seeked to direct it. They were horrified when they discoved how far the Fremen had taken the development from the Zensunni Wanderers...
(ie. you better read the series again...)
"Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive."
- Frank Herbert, Dune
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The waste water isn't stored underground for "hundreds of years".
In a septic system, the solids fall to the bottem of the vessel and the liquids travel through poris underground pipes and "water the lawn"
In A sewer system, the wast water is filtered and the solids are trucked to a landfill, or dumped in the ocean and the liquids are returned to the nearest river.
Both systems return the waste water localy. sewer systems are not much bigger than the city they service.
it was like that when I got here.. I wasen't here when that happened... second shift musta done that....
From The Ringworld Throne:
1733 AD - Puppeteer Experimentalist regime introduces superconductor plague to Ringworld
- Fall of the Cities
2851 AD - Ringworld
- Lying Bastard shot down and impacts Ringworld
2878 AD - Ringworld Engineers
- Hot Needle of Inquiry reaches Ringworld
Condensation catchments were developed over many generations in arid climates. I bet none of these industrial capacity systems have any projection what sucking the scarce moisture from the air for troops will do to the rest of the extremely fragile desert ecosystem that also depends on it. Maybe that's why so many of the places humans have lived longest are now deserts.
--
make install -not war
There are two parts to an air conditioning system, the evaporator is where refrigerant is evaporated, removing heat (sensible energy) and CONDENSATION (latent energy) and the condenser where refrigerant is condensed back to liquid.
I hate to break it to you, but when you flush, that waste water goes to a water treatment plant and is returned to the environment. Even if it is some distant lake, it is not hundreds of miles away. The atmosphere is an open system.
I'm not not licking toads.
If you've got any evidence of that, please quote it. If so, I've been misinformed by expert reports on the subject.
Septic tanks are specifically built deep enough that tree roots can't reach them, and clog them up. While I suppose there may be tiny ammounts of water somehow getting back up to the surface, most of it slowly decends down torwards the water table.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The system in question certainly doesn't use cooling to extract moisture from the air, or anything of the sort.
It doesn't have to strictly be HUNDREDS of miles away to fit my post. "Dozens" of miles will still pose the same issues.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I also seem to recall such a scene in the movie "Dune".
He was originally sent by the Aussie Army to learn about bush tucker. After leaving the Army he made a few shows for the ABC.
ooh, looks like the ABC still sells the DVD's
---- Put Sig here:
When someone points out my mistakes they're doing me a favour - I never accuse them of being touchy.
No-one mentioned `intelligent design`, so I'm not sure where that came from.
You didn't correct one of my mistakes, I was responding to your response. I guess my point was you seem to indicate intolerance at the mere suggestion that something in the Bible could be historically accurate. Even if you think the Bible is a myth (and it's obvious you do), you might have shown a more level response than you did. A myth is what? A natural phenomenom deitized by people who could not scientifically explain it at the time. What he was suggesting was that the Bible described natural phenonem that could have scientifically happened but been unexplainable at the time.
Rather than take it at face value you became caustic, asserting that nothing in the Bible could be true (saying its all a bunch of bullcrap). Just because you don't believe in the Christian God (or any, I don't care) does not mean you have to discount everything in the Bible. I don't "believe" in Greek mythology, but I think it is wonderful literature, and (gasp) has some overlap with reality. I don't feel the need to call it crap. This is the type of vibe I got from your post. I'd apologize but I don't think I'm far off.
As far as Intelligent design, your response was a knee-jerk reaction to a man's post, as if he was proselytizing. Hence I mentioned Intelligent design as an example of what he was not doing. You seem to have taken a quite literal reading of both his post and mine. GG
> A myth is what? A natural phenomenom deitized by people who could not scientifically explain it at the time. What he was suggesting
> was that the Bible described natural phenonem that could have scientifically happened but been unexplainable at the time.
But people believe it now, even in the absense of proof? Why the emotional attachment to it? Why the vested interest? Give it up! There are loads of things in the bible (and other religious documents) that read like badly imagined childrens stories. Jews in Egypt? No proof at all - not a scrap of evidence. Parting of the sea, the ark... I mean, if you want to pretend it's true then go for it, but call it fiction, not `not disproved`. These people aren't describing `natural phenomenom` - they didn't even happen! Someone made it up, and other people who don't know those people are trying to back up it. That's not myth, that's just making shit up!
> Just because you don't believe in the Christian God (or any, I don't care) does not mean you have to discount everything in the
> Bible.
Some of it's true, I'm sure.
> I don't "believe" in Greek mythology, but I think it is wonderful literature, and (gasp) has some overlap with reality. I don't feel
> the need to call it crap
That's not what we're comparing, though. People don't say the bible is "wonderful literature" (for obvious reasons) - they said it's an accurate historical record. But it's not, is it.