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."
Still suits next? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:When the figurative white man "discovers" it (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Is that how they do it?
Amazing what you can carry on the back of a Camel.
Re:When the figurative white man "discovers" it (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:When the figurative white man "discovers" it (Score:3, Insightful)
[citation needed]
Re:And this is news how? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Learned this in summer camp (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Still suits next? (Score:5, Insightful)
I get the feel from the articles that downstream providers are farmers and not parched wildlife.
Charles
Re:Still suits next? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems like if you are able to collect a quart of rainwater in a reasonably sized, "barrel", then there is a lot more than a gallon of water in the air over that acre.
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
The Milagro Beanfield War (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] (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.
Re:Still suits next? (Score:2, Insightful)
Dude.
Wow.
Re:The Milagro Beanfield War (Score:1, Insightful)
In addition, film critic Richard Scheib believes The Milagro Beanfield War is "one of the first American films to fall into the Latin American tradition of magical realism. This is a genre that usually involves an earthily naturalistic, often highly romanticized, blend of the supernatural and whimsical."[3] The magic mainly revolves around the character of Amarante Cordova who talks to his dead friend and asks the spirit world for help.
If you are stating an ideology, would it not make more sense to base it on events that actually happen regularly in the real world, rather than fiction? And if it does happen regularly, why must depictions of it be fictionalised? Is it difficult to wring the point you wish to make out of the truth?
A parallel case is bit like films about the suffering of prisoners on death row - they will virtually always be fictionalised, and the involved individuals will be falsely convicted. This is because the intention and the ideology is to portray them compassionately. In reality, although false convictions inevitably must happen, the individuals that get sentenced to death typically have a series of prior convictions that would cause liberal moviegoers to vomit. Hence, the point the moviemaker wishes to make cannot be supported by reality, and so fictionalisation follows. Feel free to disprove this by doing a list of films about death row inmates and whether they are based on true events and whether that portrayal includes prior convictions.
Re:In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Your sand worm is in my sarlac! (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if I could only find a droid who speaks the binary language of moisture evaporators...
Re:active vs passive (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bet the Fremen didn't have to deal with patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Will these scientists ever learn? (Score:4, Insightful)
I for one will continue diligently keeping urinating into my stillsuit with the water recycling conservatively set on 'maximum.'
"Set on Maximum"? Huh. You obviously have one of those city-dweller stillsuits. That's a bodybag in the desert.
Re:Still suits next? (Score:4, Insightful)
Humidity is calculated in relative terms, 100% humidity at 0C in less than 100% humidity at 38C in term of the absolute amount of water contained in the air.
How could you have come up with the exact answer while missing the "average temperature in Colorado" parameter ? ;-))
Re:only if you extract a lot (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm... I suspect that has been said about technologies that after a while ended up being used on a large enough scale to affect the environment.
Note that I am not saying that this specific technology would end up being used on a large enough scale. I am just reminding history.
Re:Still suits next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is hard to tax the collection of rainwater?
Maybe I'm too cynical but I just cannot honestly imagine that this has anything to do with any actual environmental concern.