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Drinking Coffee From a Cup In Space
muggs was one of several readers to note a fluffy piece making the rounds about an astronaut inventing a
zero-g coffee cup. Of course, since the space station inhabitants drink recycled urine, I'm still not totally convinced that I would want to try that cup.
I doubt there's been enough life on this planet drinking and p*ssing for long enough that you could state with any confidence that each and every water molecule on the planet had at one time passed through some creature?
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
Where are my mod points when I need them?
Perhaps you mean a different thing than I do when you say "science."
I am pretty sure what they are referring to are satellites already at their desired orbit.
Once satellites reach their orbit, they don't just sit there. After some time the orbit can start to shift around, so satellites use very small station keeping thrusters.
Most of the time these thrusters are bi-props (MMH and NTO) that use the same tanks that were employed to feed the much larger main engine used to circularize the orbit.
But once the satellite is at orbit, you have a relatively small amount of fuel / ox left in a large, mostly empty tank. So you need some stuff in the tank to hold the enough fuel for a quick firing of a station keeping thruster.
This thruster firing occurs in a "weightless" environment. If there wasn't some apparatus to collect and hold fuel / ox, you could never fire a thruster, which in turn sloshes some fuel / ox around, which is captured by the apparatus, which can be used for the next firing... until there is just no more fuel / ox left and the satellite is "dead".
I believe it is the above set of circumstances he is referring to.
And, after it cools down, the taste isn't bad either, I can tell you.
OK since I'm a nerd I did some off-the-cuff, very approximate calculations. Say the total water consumption by living creatures is equivalent to 100 billion humans, who each consume a gallon a day, and have been doing so for a billion years. That gives (100 billion humans)*(1 billion years)*(1 gallon/human/day)*(365 days/year) = 3.65*10^16 gallons consumed. Compare this to the 3.26*10^17 gallons of water on the Earth.
Given how wildly inaccurate I'm sure my assumptions are, I guess this doesn't really prove anything (other than that I'm a nerd). I was hoping there'd be like four order's of magnitude difference one way or the other.
I've read some interesting psychology research done on humans and how they value, and transfer, the concept of filth. It's not logical, and it's pervasive.
The basic experiment works like this: you offer the subject two pieces of chocolate. One looks like a bar of chocolate. The other looks like a turd. You ask the subject which one is preferable, and what value it has over the other ("Would you eat the turd over the bar for $1?") Another version, that measures how the brain transfers filth, offers two cups of tea, one stirred with a spoon, the other with a brand-new just-removed-from-package flyswatter. People place a measurable, significant value on the object that isn't associated with filth, even if there isn't actually any filth there. It's just the perception. People mentally mark things as dirty/unhealthy/nasty, and then mark anything that's been touched by those things as similarly filthy. You can measure how much people think types of contact dilute filth ("five-second rule!") and how they perceive filth degrading over time.
And the somewhat ironic thing is that fresh urine is one of the more sterile materials out there. There are orders of magnitude less nasty infectous beasts in a nice frosty cuppa pee than in someone's saliva.
But that doesn't make people like it any better.
It horrifies many people when they go on bike rides along the river and see the waste treatment plants dumping water out into the river upstream of other cities. They realize those other cities are drinking their pee, and they in turn are drinking someone else's pee. I guess that before that point, they think that waste just *vanishes* somehow. Personally, I've often looked at watershed drainage maps and calculated how many people water has been through when it gets to, eg Des Moines compared to Black Hawk, Colorado. (I estimate 4 animals, maybe 1 person, for Black Hawk, and more like 30-70 animals/people for Des Moines.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
There are issues with irradiated and genetically modified foods. There's a mountain of evidence that the former are less nutritious, and in every comparison I've ever tried the former did not taste nearly as good as organic.
You can talk all you want about increasing crop yields, but it's not like we're anywhere near a food shortage in this country. The government still pays some farmers a boatload not to grow anything every year.
You can drink your own pee, quite safely. It is sterile, after all.
I've seen so many people say this but most do not understand what it really means.
Urine is sterile before it leaves the bladder; and then that's only usually - not always. That's it. If you have bacterial contamination in your urethra, your urine is now contaminated too. If you have a bladder infection, your bladder is also infected - even in the bladder. Mild infections which naturally pass in a couple of days are not uncommon. This is especially true if you are sexually active. Especially so if you are a sexually active female.
Also, if you are dehydrated, urine is not safe to drink. This is because the contaminates extracted from your body are no longer dilute enough and you are now poisoning your self with a concentrated form of whatever your body previously removed from your body - which may now overload your kidneys. Given some 40%+ of the US general population is at least mildly dehydrated, consuming one's own urine is risky. Furthermore, urine which is not clear, should *never* be consumed.
One should never drink urine unless your life hangs in the balance, as otherwise compromising your health and kidneys may be the price you pay. If no water is available, drinking urine is acceptable but only so long as it remains clear.