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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
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.
Walk without rythm, fellow travelers.
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.
What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
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.
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
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
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!
Clearly, this is on a larger scale and far more impressive than what you did when you were 12.
Seriously, just because you did something which is conceptually similar, doesn't mean that this isn't an advance. Conceptually, flight hasn't changed since the Wright Brothers. Practically, it obviously has.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Thanks for clearing that up. I thought you meant he would suddenly notice Solid Snake sneaking around his desalinization plant.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Note to those who may want to try this at home: piss in the *vegetation*, not the mug...
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.
Sounds like the plot of Tank Girl
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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
...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.
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