Slashdot Mirror
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
If you extract moisture from already very dry are do you not create a dead zone down wind?
There is life everywhere in the desert, most of which is tuned to live on very little water, but all of which need water from some source occasionally.
Pushing humans into these areas where the only source of water is minimally moist seems rather pointless and ill advised.
Would it work on mars?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Really? Is that how they do it?
Amazing what you can carry on the back of a Camel.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Walk without rythm, fellow travelers.
When I was 12 they taught us how to make a moisture trap with a can and some cellophane. Granted we weren't in a desert, but I am surprised if this "new" development surprises anybody.
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.
Aww.../. stripped out my Arabic script. Why are you such ascii-ists /.?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
So in a decade when these are ubiquitous and most of the world is a desert, suddenly the Fraunhofer Institute will announce they had a patent on this and anyone drinking the water will have to pay licensing fees.
Great, just... great.
Can you give citations for dessert dwellers using brine solutions and vacuum chambers to pull water out of the air in the absence of any material with a temperature below the due point? I won't hold you to the 'thousands of years' part. Last I checked, dessert dwellers didn't do so well with salt water until recently, and then, only industrial scale desalinization projects. If they were using this method, it seems like they should have hit on desalinization a very long time ago.
Or did you not RTFA and thus think it was the trivial survival technique using condensation and gravity during night time hours?
Realities just a bunch of bits.
Isn't this what Luke Skywalker's uncle did for a living? I thought it was a given that you could condense water out of thin air.... My refrigerator does this all the time.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
[citation needed]
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.
>dessert dwellers
Dessert, eh?
http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF145-Nunez.jpg
present day... present time... hahahaha...
> Frank Herbert's Moisture Traps May Be a Reality
No Kidding. The Jihad is a reality too.
I'm glad that people are focusing on answers for people in underprivileged parts of the world, but it's not some sort of magical discovery.
You must have read the wrong article. They never claimed it was magic.
P.S. Claiming you haven't read the article doesn't absolve you if you make a mistake.
Dual Opteron < $600
Please. Dune is fantasy, not science fiction.
Well its not Ringworld, but then its not The Lord of the Rings either. Its between the two. Fantasy readers would probably say it is SF. SF readers would say the opposite.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you want to get enough water to live out of that mug, I'd suggest you dig a pit, put the mug in the bottom of it, pile any vegetation you can get around the edges, piss in it for good measure, then secure your ground sheet over the top with rocks and use a pebble to make it slanted towards the middle. Actually produces quite a lot of water, you might want to use a cooking pot instead.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Here in California our snow packs are dwindling year after year, which means our valleys are likely to revert to their natural desert climate. That's where a full third of our nation's food comes from. We might want to consider some windtraps, not growing rice in a desert, or maybe borrow some Australian expertise to do something cool.
Niven toyed with the idea of genetic (RNA at least) memory too, before he grew out of it.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
hey, at least he used the right form of "desert".
Pardon me while I watch my karma burn.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Thanks for clearing that up. I thought you meant he would suddenly notice Solid Snake sneaking around his desalinization plant.
I don't think this will be used on a large enough scale to seriously affect the environment
Wanna say that to my crysknife, punk?
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.
The problem with this design is it requires electricity, which means expensive solar cells and periodic maintenance to clean them off.
The moisture traps mentioned in Dune already do exist, and are entirely passive. You need an underground chamber with a few vents in the sides, and vent in the top with a chimney. The air rises in the chimney creating a constant flow of air into the chamber, and moisture condenses due to the cooler conditions in the chamber than outside.
You need to be moving for the still suit to work.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
Do you know why it's illegal to collect rainwater in a barrel in Utah and Colorado? If there is only a gallon of water in the air over an acre of land, removing a quart does in fact change the balance of things.
That's a load of pseudoscience, backing up a law that exists only for revenue, cronyism, and political control. If you store water off your roof or that falls from the sky, and then use it in your home or for irrigation, you're returning that water right back into the water table...in fact, use in the home returns it more effectively, because it is reintroduced a few feet under the soil by your septic system. You're not 'stealing' water- it doesn't go anywhere.
If you want to know the real reason laws like that exist, read The Milagro Beanfield War (annoyingly, that link is about the movie, not the book.) I read it in middle school, and it gave me great insight into how big business pushes citizens around.
Also, you can take a look at what the Israelis are doing to all of the rivers that feed into or border Palestine for a great example of how water is controlled for racial oppression and political power.
Please help metamoderate.
don't trust them. they'll let the concept out then they'll hit you up for license fees later on.
"its a trap"
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This method seems to result in pure distilled water which is generally considered harmful as your sole water supply. It's lacking in minerals that the body uses and also will turn acidic naturally. I guess since you're IN a desert though, they could scoop up a few spoonfuls of dirt and mix it in with your nice clear glass of fresh water. :-)
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I never knew humans lived in salinated desserts before. Could you please tell me more?
I live in southeastern Australia, and down here, we haven't had regular rainfall now since 1995. Melbourne's water reserves are currently sitting at around 25%. The government's been talking about dredging the Yarra, the city's river, and that is only about a third of peak level at the moment as it is.
This tells me that the long term trend for Victoria is desertification. Queensland is getting floods these days, while we get barely a drop. Unless we're planning on abandoning the entire state, we're going to need technologies exactly like these, in order to be able to continue to live here.
This seems like a more complicated version of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator with a solar panel slapped on them.
IMO, the dividing line is the amount of hand-waving you do. Like how to survive in the desert:
Hard fantasy: "I cast a spell of protection from elements"
Soft fantasy: "The quantronic radiation on this planet..."
Soft SF: "I'll put on my stillsuit"
Hard SF: Even more science?
I sometimes get the impression that SF defines themselves too narrow because SF is still supposed to tell a story which is what should engage you, it's not a discovery show on what science could be like 100 years from now. Of course, if science has no real place at all it's really a space opera but it doesn't have to be primarily a science story as long as the storyline is interrelated with the science.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser)
I've often thought that equatorial regions near oceans are letting a huge energy resource go to waste while they suffer increased desertification.
Sun light could be used to pump sea water, evaporate it, and pump condensed briny water back to the sea. You could also use solar powered RO, but that might be more expensive due to the media replacement needs.
Even if you did not get enough for western style irrigation you could use it to slow down or reverse the process of desertification, preserving marginal adjacent farm/grazing land.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
o like oat or boat. (p)oat-uh-bull !
Po - Ta - Ble
Here. It even says it for you.
What's potable, preciouss?
Did you just copy that from /b/?
Good for you, except it isn't trolling /., its still trolling /b/ except now where no one from /b/ will ever read it. I'm pretty sure all their trolls are scripted by now, and generally are at least amusing, or... you know... someone in the flavor of trolling the average /. user.
I'd personally take the "did you hear about the singularity" guy, or the iPhone rectal stimulation guy, it at least is somewhat in the scope of /.
If your going to troll, please put some EFFORT into it.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
There are fantasy elements, though they're framed (at least in the later books) in a sort of pseudo-scientific sense. But the ecological aspects of Dune, well those are based on a lot sounder principles. This was Herbert's particular area of expertise, and he put a considerable amount of effort into developing the ecology and climate of Arrakis, and the Fremen technology, while certainly more advanced than ours, isn't so advanced that I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible within a few decades.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sadly, Niven didn't grow out of the Protector crapola. I love Neutron Star and a lot of the other early Known Universe stories, but the Protectors-are-human-ancestors-from-another-planet theme sounded moronic even forty years ago.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When I read this article I was expecting to see another machine based on the ammonia absorption cycle. I was pleasantly surprised to see something new. This is interesting and should be followed to see if it becomes reality.
It's been possible to build an air-water condenser using the ammonia absorption cycle since the 1800s. Blow air across the cold outer surface and the heat exchange causes condensation. A gentleman proposed "oasis machines" which would be a condenser hidden in a decorative pool / fountain from which local villagers could draw water. It was self contained and needed no outside electricity, perhaps solar. He proposed it as a solution to providing water to villagers in Africa, etc. A poster above did mention the problem of the water lacking in mineral nutrients.
fuck you. i can get water out of the air with a sheet of plastic a fair size hole in the ground, and a rock. (google solar still)
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
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..."
Fantasy is a good way to simplify scientific concepts, provided the fantasy actually tracks the science. If there's no believability, it doesn't make a very good story.
The line between SF and Fantasy has always been a little blurry (nowhere near as blurry as in Chalker's "Masters of Flux and Anchor" series which was a brilliant expansion on Clarke's Law, and a very good read if you can ignore the implicit mysogny in most of his works).
I've worried that Clarke's Law is taken as transitive by some (thank The Pasta for predictable and reproduceable results). I've also thought that we're on a trend to realisation of C.P.Snow's great cultural divide between the knowledge "haves" and "have-nots". I see this among friends who firmly believe that technology comes from observing certain rituals, rather than scientific advancement and engineering process. They're very Cargo Cult and not a little bit frightening.
The truly frightening thing is I have difficulty explaining the difference to them. The gulf is almost too deep to cross now.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Forget the still suit, I'm trading my ticket for passage to Alderan for a used land speeder so I can become a moisture farmer!
Now, if I could only find a droid who speaks the binary language of moisture evaporators...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Please. Dune is fantasy, not science fiction.
The fact that Dune describes a feudal society does not make it fantasy.
...was to effectively trap the wind emerging from slashdotters.
Note to those who may want to try this at home: piss in the *vegetation*, not the mug...
Thousands of years of plastic?
Note to those who may want to try this at home: piss in the *vegetation*, not the mug...
Stop that. I'm planting seeds for the Darwin awards.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I thought he meant the Arab guy would have a quest for him.
I'm no expert but a thing to be aware of, it won't produce pure water. It will produce other liquids/chemicals that condense at vaguely similar temperatures that happen to be vapour in there.
If you haven't been eating or drinking anything terribly bad, using pee shouldn't be too bad, but be a bit selective with the vegetation - skip it if it's got the usual "Nature's warning colours" all over it, or smells funny.
Various other alcohols (including nasty ones) have boiling points not far below that of water.
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.
A large pile of rocks will do the same thing, pretty much.
http://www.european-pyramids.eu/wb/pages/european-pyramids/greece.php
Same end effect, with no tech. Much cheaper, I'd bet. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
You must have read the wrong article. They never claimed it was magic.
You must have read the wrong article. They claimed it was "found." Solar hydroscopic water extraction dates back to at least the '90's. You seized on the wrong word. "Magic" could have been "fantabulous" or "wang-wagging" and my statement would still stand.
P.S. Claiming you haven't read the article doesn't absolve you if you make a mistake.
Having read the article doesn't mean that you have analyzed it effectively.
I mean, really, I was making a light-hearted joke and the half-grokking slashdot attack-dogs got all uppity over it. It's a good thing that people are looking to improve living standards globally, but this is not a discovery or major step forward. It's an elegant application of ongoing work. It's a good thing, but it's not a game-changer.
both copyright infigement and [possibly]implementation, 2-in-1, here. btw F Herbert will be proud. maybe.
Seriously, that's your biggest grip? The protector idea rocks compared to breed-for-lucky shit.
XML causes global warming.
you call that a crysknife, mate? THIS is a crysknife.
slashdot as court of thermodynamics ? awesome !
For 1000's of years, non-white desert dwellers have constructed large towers that deliver 100's of gallons/day -- all automatically powered by the sun -- and no manual effort required...
WOW...
Um, could you cite references?
I agree. This is classic Boy Scout 101 RTFM!
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
Yes been done in South America for some time
http://www.oas.org/dsd/publications/Unit/oea59e/ch12.htm
"Fog harvesting has been investigated for more than thirty years and has been implemented successfully in the mountainous
coastal areas of Chile (see case study in Part C, Chapter 5),
Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru."
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Most (All, before Dias discovered Cape in 1488) of the goods carried from India and China to Europe. How did you think Chinese sold lowest quality (according to their standards) of earth-ware to your ancestors as "finest in the world" for centuries?
Listening in from WA
From a state that is already 95% desert - also where most of our exports come from (the mines) we could use these.
Currently, water to the Goldfields is pumped 600km from the Hills - an engineering feat in 1902, but also highly energy-hungry. Water from the desert's air? BHP will be mighty pleased...
Wait! Whats a sig?
And how is this different from the evaporation stills I've been using for years? More efficient no doubt, but the concept is still the same, and published in countless survival books.
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.
Sir - My first job was programming binary load lifters... very similar to your vaporators in most respects. ...
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
Now where's my stillsuit! :D
I've wanted one of those forever!
Why, if not because?
When I read your post, I was all like "! "
Everybody uses broad generalizations.
...of water in the desert air, apparently.
The caretaker of my building in Cairo directs the water that condenses in all of the air-conditioner units in the building into the gardens. While it isn't energy efficient AT ALL, I am always surprised by how much water gets to the garden. And as the weather gets hotter, the residents use their air-con more meaning more water for the garden. Again, it's not energy efficient in any way, but it does save water by reclaiming it from the air, and quite a lot of it.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
I blame that butterfly in 1995 that flapped its wings and caused rippled effects.
or it could be those greedy farmers in brazil chopping down forrests like its going out of style.
Then again, who knows in a few years we could turn around and get 5x rainfall each year, dont forget
that weather also has long term 30+year cycles too.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Beware, It's a trap !
(sorry)
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Crysknives are nice because you can dual-wield them with an artifact.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
http://www.sumware.com/creation.html My pleasure.
No-one said it did. Your comment makes no sense. If you mean because it describes a feudal society then it isn't fantasy then you are wrong.
It's a feudal society in an imaginary universe, where they inhabit imaginary planets, with imaginary mystic powers, with imaginary creatures roaming the desert. Science fiction is usually described as a story taking place in a believable setting with only the science extrapolated beyond current levels. Fantasy has no such constraints. I suppose you would regard Harry Potter as Sci-Fi then, after all schools are real !
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."
Solar hydroscopic water extraction dates back to at least the '90's.
Yeah, stupid scientists working on solving a problem that's already been solved and people in these climates are only milking this "we don't have clean water" deal to get their less than a cup of coffee a day money from us. I mean a solar powered optical device that can view below the surface of water should have solved all these problems. Or did you mean hygroscopic?
I mean, really, I was making a light-hearted joke
If a joke falls in the forest and nobody laughs was it really a joke?
Don't be one of those guys that is wrong and then winds up looking even more foolish trying to prove that he wasn't THAT wrong. Or start a collection to buy a whole lot of cups and take your troop out to the desert and start generating the water for people to drink and grow crops because the world isn't getting any bigger and while the number of people living on it is.
Dual Opteron < $600
Yep, hygroscopic, though it takes a serious amount of effort to get my hands to type "hy" without "d" to follow.
Look, you can get all holier-than-thou and... wait.. what? Slashdot? Yeah.
Of course I was wrong about the article originally (I said I hadn't read it, so odds are), but the tone and text of the article leads one to believe that the researchers in question have discovered something new. What they are doing is phenomenally important, but it's not a new discovery. Scary how, after making this point a few times, it's still not sticking with you.
The Model T wasn't a new discovery either, but Ford instituted a manufacturing practice that made it far more accessible. Things can be important to humanity without being new discoveries. You can continue to ignore the point if you like, but that will just make this thread even more unreadable on mobile devices.
You may want to change your name to Malthus with the "number of people" doom and gloom, but you don't need a big hand-waving global-food-supply panic argument to get behind atmospheric water extraction. You just need people who are born in arid climates
Actually, my biggest gripe against Niven is the last two Ringworld books, and in particular the last one, because it was just the most gawdawful unreadable crap I've ever seen from a major author in any genre. It really seems to be true that once writers hit a certain age, they're gifts seem to fade.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yep, hygroscopic, though it takes a serious amount of effort to get my hands to type "hy" without "d" to follow.
I imagine hydenas that would laugh hydsterically at your effort to avoid "d". In the meanwhile, I fantasize driving in an imaginary Hydunday hydbrid car trying to make things more hydgienic for the environment whose hydmen we are constantly raping praising hydmns about our technological progress ignoring hydpe about the planet fighting back. I could go on, but yes, "d" is hard to avoid.
On a more serious side-note, you can always blame the ancient Greeks for not making it easier for later generations combining "hydor" (water) with "hygron" (liquid).
I speak England very best
When I was taking a lot of composition/creative writing classes, we spent a few hashing out the differences between fiction, science fiction, and fantasy (as several of our teachers said they didn't accept "genre" submissions, by which they meant "science fiction and fantasy", and we were disputing what those meant.)
What we came up with was:
Fiction is an author's view of how people interact with and are changed by current society.
Science fiction is an author's view of how people interact and are changed by a society that could be reasonably predicted to evolve from our current society.
Fantasy is the author's view on how people interact and are changed by a society that is similar to ours but operates with different natural laws than ours.
As such, we came to the conclusion that in many ways science fiction is the most powerful fiction writing, because it's a warning.
Later I came across a Stanislaw Lem quote, that says, in essence: if all memory of literature were lost, the first thing people would start writing would be science fiction because it warns us of the consequences of where we're going.
Some of the greatest current fiction writing is science fiction, called "speculative fiction" to make it sound more acceptable.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Would a water grid to more evenly distribute water be feasible? It works for electricity, why not water?
Various other alcohols (including nasty ones) have boiling points not far below that of water.
I don't see the problem... oh wait.
"Collect 10 Intact Salmon Brains and return to me and I'll make you a [Salmon Brain Compass]."
Of course only one out of every 3 salmon have a brain.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm thinking the power supply is a small diesel engine from a tractor. There appears to be an over abundance of metal used, but that could be "slimed" down later. What I think is most interesting is the location, a place where Artic Circle Testing could accomplished with little transportation costs. Temperatures at Alaska range from the very hot to the very cold. Just a funny thought, what would it look like if one of the Inuit Tribes were to use it to hunt Whale? That would make an entertaining summer movie.
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.
This is also a method by which you can recycle your own urine (just like Freemen! Or astronauts!) by peeing in a wide hole, putting the collection bucket in the middle, and the plastic over the hole with a rock in the middle. Water from urine evaporates, condenses on plastic, there ya go.
The enemies of Democracy are
Frank Herbert, while speaking in a radio interview on a call-in show around 1984, said that he saw a pilot project of a desert moisture collector while he was doing research as a journalist back in the Sixties.
Now Dune would be a good MMO universe, imo.
It could work a great starcraft type RTS as well.
2 comments:
1) This sounds better suited to desalination. A house on California's beaches or a boat could use this to evaporate ocean water. Current methods use too much electricity.
2) Maintaining a vacuum - how is the vacuum maintained? The sun sets, pausing evaporation. The exit tube drains or dries. Vacuum lost. It seems like there's more to a closed loop, specifically a solar panel, battery, valve, and controller. When the sun sets the valve would shut to keep water in the tube. When evaporation
resumes the valve opens and trickling continues.
Or perhaps there is a power-free mechanical solution where the tube expands for a lot of water and squeezes shut when there is little.
o, it's Sci-Fi
Seriously, it is. Name a Sci-Fi work without a 'Fantasy' technology in it?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've only got 1 thing to say "Maud'Dib"!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Or long pipe technology.
Move the excess water from Queensland during the floods.
Yes I know it's bloody far. Build some sort of water carrying thing. call it a aqua passage..or a water duct, or some such.
Wait this is Australia. call it a Wazzer-Doodla-Ga
Hey, at least I didn't suggest you get water from your neighbor Germany.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And I believe Pratchett's corollary, wasn't it? "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced".
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Less than 200KM to the nearest ocean. Start laying some pipes...
That's very likely more efficient than trying to pull water from the air.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So, in other words, we extract moisture from the air to drink, so that the air becomes drier and you then have to drink more to make up for the moisture you are now loosing more rapidly through evaporation?
I can imagine walking up to the "moisture vacuum" around these things and instantly crumpling into a pruned-up mummy.
The universe isn't imaginary- it is supposed to be this one, only long after humans left and "forgot" Earth. All planets in sci fi are imaginary, unless they're the 8 or so that we know about today. All aliens are imaginary creatures, and there are lots of aliens in sci fi.
All of the mystic powers seem outlandish today, but we've got to put the book in context. It was written in the early 60's, only a decade or so since DNA's role in heredity had been proven. Back then, the concept of "genetic memory" was actually pretty credible. Even the "seeing the future" device, which is pretty difficult to swallow, had a fairly firm grounding in early quantum theory, and would have found quite a few reputable supporters in the science community of the time, if only as a distantly unlikely possibility.
Just because it seems daft now, it doesn't mean it wasn't science. Science fiction in the 40's and 50's used to talk about Mars as anything from an inhabitable desert to a lush jungle planet teeming with life. It wasn't until the 60's that this was properly debunked, and now it seems ridiculous. But to them at the time, it seemed like proper science.
More efficient how?
TFA suggests a method of collecting water, for free, from the air without requiring any additional energy input. You're suggesting they build a 200km pipe, plus desalination plant, to pump water across miles of hostile desert.
Assuming TFA's invention isn't very expensive (and if it's just brine and solar heaters, it shouldn't be), I fail to see how mass desalination and water transport is going to be "more efficient". Easier perhaps, but efficient it isn't.
It's not "free" in the slightest. It has an extremely high initial cost, and huge operating costs, due to deterioration of solar panels and fatigue of all mechanical parts.
By the above logic, all of that is "free" too... right?
And the desalination plant is definitely "free" because you need precisely that for separating the water from the brine in the air-based system as well.
That's a terrible and baseless assumption.
You also utterly fail to consider VOLUME. Even a tiny pipeline will move a HUGE amount of water, whenever you want. You can't, however, gather much water from the air.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant