Frank Herbert's Moisture Traps May Be a Reality 226
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."
Re:And this is news how? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:When the figurative white man "discovers" it (Score:5, Informative)
Similar story using different tech posted in 2000 (Score:3, Informative)
Fog Collection As Sustainable Water Source [slashdot.org]
jdb2
Re:And this is news how? (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't use condensation from the air. It exposes a hygroscopic fluid to the air, then removes the water through distillation.
Re:So how do you pronounce 'potable' anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
Po - Ta - Ble
Here. [answers.com] It even says it for you.
Re:Still suits next? (Score:4, Informative)
Last I checked, there were millions of people in Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc..
Re:Skywalker's Uncle? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:When the figurative white man "discovers" it (Score:4, Informative)
Pardon me while I watch my karma burn.
Re:Still suits next? (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude.
According to http://www.nationalatlas.gov [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 [usgs.gov]) of 5 people.
Re:Still suits next? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Atmospheric Water Generator? (Score:1, Informative)
This seems like a more complicated version of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_water_generator [wikipedia.org] with a solar panel slapped on them.
Re:And this is news how? (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser)
Re:So how do you pronounce 'potable' anyway? (Score:1, Informative)
o like oat or boat. (p)oat-uh-bull !
Re:And this is news how? (Score:5, Informative)
Note to those who may want to try this at home: piss in the *vegetation*, not the mug...
Not quite (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:When the figurative white man "discovers" it (Score:3, Informative)
Here is another form of desert water collection that is very cheap if you are near areas which have fogs [uea.ac.uk].
Re:In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune (Score:2, Informative)
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."