Comment on Penn Engineers Discover a New Class of Materials That Passively Harvest Water from Air

Endmaker@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• kinther@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Yeah that was my thought too. I hope it makes it to actual use cases and not just lab proof of concept.

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• FMT99@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Yeah now we can industrially extract all the remaining water from the air as well as the ground.

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  • Jimbabwe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    You realize the amount of water is constant, right?

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    • baldingpudenda@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      FMT99 missed the week they taught the water cycle.

      Image

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    • aesthelete@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      They do have a point about groundwater though.

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    • match@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Not if Nestle has anything to say about it

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    • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Water is created and destroyed by biological and other natural processes. Here go photosynthesis:

      6CO₂ + 6H₂O + Light → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂

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    • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      We prefer the term “recycled dinosaur pee”.

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    • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I am fairly certain they are referring to the fact that we are already removing water from the fresh water cycle, and this could remove even more. For example, global warming combined with draining the aquafers means less water in the cycle as it was drained into the ocean and isn’t beaing replenished as snow/glaicers.

      Yes, the total volume of water on the planet isn’t being changed by that shift, but the amount of freshwater is.

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      • Eheran@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Nobody will remove water from ambient air in relevant amounts. Roughly 0.5 % of air is water vapor, a total of something like 10’000 km³ liquid water. This is replaced (residence time) about once every 10 days, so roughly 1’000 km³ daily.

        Say we extract 10 km³ (10’000’000 m³) daily, enough for roughly 10 million people (including all industry, zero recycling of the water etc.). By that time you deal with 1 % of earths atmosphere every day. May I remind everyone how absurdly costly in any conceivable way that would be? You would rather lay a few pipes and purify sea water at a tiny(!) fraction of the cost.

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