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Frank Herbert's Moisture Traps May Be a Reality
Omomyid writes "In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune,' Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water."
The difference is that this can work throughout the sunlit hours, even in the absence of thermal fluctuations. Please RTFA before dismissing it.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Hell with the 'white', when 'man' discovers it it's important. Mankind pat itself on the back whenever they figure out how to do something (no matter how poorly) that nature figured out a long time ago. I often think of going back in time and telling the Arabi who invented the magnetic compass - 'hey you know salmon have these in their brain at birth'. He'd be all like "! "
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
There was a story posted about fog capture for drinking water -- "fog nets" -- back in 2000 :
Fog Collection As Sustainable Water Source
jdb2
It doesn't use condensation from the air. It exposes a hygroscopic fluid to the air, then removes the water through distillation.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Po - Ta - Ble
Here. It even says it for you.
Last I checked, there were millions of people in Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc..
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The trick in TFA is pulling water out of the air without keeping parts of your apparatus below the dew point, which takes a fair bit of energy. There are still some active parts, looks like mostly pumps, and some solar heating; but no refrigeration is required.
If you have massive energy to throw at the problem, it is trivial(like a great many problems), solving it with relatively little energy is the real trick.
hey, at least he used the right form of "desert".
Pardon me while I watch my karma burn.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude.
According to http://www.nationalatlas.gov, the driest parts of Colorado get about 7" of rain annually (average rainfall is about 15"). that comes to 190,080 gallons per acre and would provide the total (drinking, washing, etc.) annual water usage (approximately 100 gallons per day per person, according to the US geological survey) of 5 people.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
It's illegal because their water rights are based on a first come (excluding Indians) basis. Conventional wisdom (since disproven) was that collecting rainwater prevented it from going to it's rightful owners. More recent scientific studies have demonstrated that only 3% of rainwater ends up in the waterways.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Given the state of scientific knowledge in 1965 (when dune was published) it's a lot harder SF than some people seem to realise.
Herbert did some serious background research for Dune IMO.
Sure bits of it seem *now* to us as absurd as Doc Smith's diesel-engined spacecraft, but in 1965, 12 years after the discover of DNA, 17 years after the initial formalisation of classical information theory, when computers were still mostly small-room-sized, the idea the genetic code could pass down memories wasn't all that outlandish a hypothesis - in fact it seemed pretty reasonable. If you were writing now you'd probably come up with people being genetically engineered to add informational appendicies to germ line DNA rather than the ability being built-in by evolution, but there's nothing impossible about it. And if you pay attention to the books, you'll note that being able to "see the future" doesn't work in a naive way either, it's clearly been modelled on "quantum collapse" and "many fingered time" that any passing 1960s physicists would have talked the ear off Herbert about.
And with very powerful figures *right now* calling for the Death of the Internet, is a ban on computing devices really that outlandish? Sure, the chances of them winning are slim in practice, but still.
This seems like a more complicated version of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator with a solar panel slapped on them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser)
o like oat or boat. (p)oat-uh-bull !
Note to those who may want to try this at home: piss in the *vegetation*, not the mug...
It is not about downstream rights, but PRIOR rights. Big difference. Out here in the west, our saying is:
Whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting.
Sadly, it seems like Texans and Easterners want to come here and pollute our water (which we have precious little of).
But all that MAY be changing. We, as individuals, have been prevented from capturing the runoff due to western water law. However, some lawyer and engineers have recently figured out that due to all concrete, farm lands, etc and our attempts to make sure that we obey the law that we are allowing upwards of 33% more water to run off to the east (TX, OK, NE, NM and KS). Colorado is building a case for holding ~33% more of the water based on that. Needless to say, that will produce some SEVERE repercussions here. In addition, Utah is also looking at how much they are losing. They think that it is something like 20% and our western slope sends another 20% to NM, AZ, NV, and CA. If this is true, it will mean that downstream may see a MAJOR cutback over there.
Western water laws are interesting.
Personally, I like the idea of trying to saturate the air over in CA, and the gulf, and working better with the weather patterns to drop more snow and rain over the west. In addition, the larger amount of clouds would block more light from coming.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually it's very simple you have a flat sheet of plastic or waterproof material, then hang it up so that one corner is sloping down to some sort of collection media (ie a bottle) and then wait for the hopefully cool night. During the night the material will be cooler than the dew point of the air causing moisture to condense on the material. Once condensed the water will slowly flow down to the collection point. Normally you won't get much water but in some situations the amount collected could be the difference between life and death.
Here is another form of desert water collection that is very cheap if you are near areas which have fogs .
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
http://www.sumware.com/creation.html My pleasure.
There was a lovely old story by Issac Asimov - can't remember the name, sorry, and any search of his work will be a long walk - that told of the author of Genesis trying to write about the Big Bang in terms of particle physics. His son chastised him over the amount of writing materials that would take. At the end of the dialogue it was oversimplified to "(sigh) In the beginning..."
The name of this short story (2 pages is "How It Happened" 1978, published in "The Winds of Change and Other Stories."