cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/59925291

The system can function in air with 20% humidity or less. But these 1,000 liter a day machines are not small, at around shipping container size.

  • MolochHorridus@lemmy.ml
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    15 hours ago

    Yet again, nobody seems to be giving a thought what this means to organisms that are living in the desert. This water is necessary for life and we’re taking it.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      If you plan on drinking the water, or cooking with the water, it’s going right back into the air after you pee or sweat and the water evaporates. Literally no damage done.

      You cannot make the water actually disappear unless you use it in some kind of chemical reaction, and even then it may end up returning to water eventually.

      • KaChilde@sh.itjust.works
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        5 hours ago

        I would think that ripping 1000L of water out of an environment in a day is going to have more immediate impacts than you eventually pissing on a cactus is going to fix…

        Sure, the water isn’t “destroyed”, but it is being removed from an ecosystem that has evolved to use every last bit of water it can find to survive. It may not be immediately obvious, but it sounds just as damaging as removing 1000L of water a day from a lake and thinking the ecosystem will be fine because you’re going to sweat next to the dry lakebed.

    • Spaceballstheusername@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      You can’t really consume water especially if you take it out of the air. Worst case you temporarily barrow it till it evaporates again it’s not like the water is suddenly gonna be pumped out to the ocean or something.

      • KaChilde@sh.itjust.works
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        5 hours ago

        Do you think they are condensing 1000L of water to then just splash it on the ground where it was farmed? That water is going to people (or more likely companies) that are going to leave the ecosystem.

        • Tja@programming.dev
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          3 hours ago

          Yes, they are going to fly away in a penis shaped rocket with all the water on board.

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      As someone who has thought about it, could you provide the data that you used to come to the conclusion that the amount of water being extracted from the air has any appreciable effect on local life?

      From my thinking…

      Death Valley covers 7800km^2.. Atmospheric moisture is typically contained in the first 10km of air. So there is somewhere around 2.5 quadrillion cubic feet of air containing 114 billion gallons of water.

      The average Atmospheric Water Vapour Residence Time is around 8 days The median is 5 days and Death Valley’s topography is a valley which would trap more moisture, but we’ll use the average instead.

      This represents a moisture turnover rate of about 625,000 Liters/second (or 1.45x10^10 gallons/day).

      So, one of these devices would consume .000185% of the moisture that enters Death Valley every day.