Humans have this nasty habit of filling themselves with either hubris or delusion and then building cities in places where cities should not be. A lot of human settlements are old and we didn’t know any better.
For instance, considering how much we need water to survive, maybe we shouldn’t have built cities and places with little to no access to water. Places like the Atacama Desert of Chile, where annual rainfall is less than 0.04 inches. There are sprinkler systems attached to suburban American homes that produce more water than that every year.
Thankfully, a team of international researchers has been developing a way to harvest water like something out of Star Wars or Dune, which are the same thing considering that Star Wars took a lot of its water-harvesting ideas from Dune. Star Wars took a lot of its ideas from Dune.
Arid Human Settlements Could One Day Get Water Via Tech That Converts Fog Into Water
The technology is called fog harvesting. In Star Wars parlance you would call it moisture farming and Luke Skywalker would be complaining about it incessantly. The technology uses fine mesh nets to collect moisture from fog and then convert that mistiness into drinkable water.
According to a study published in Frontiers in Environmental Science, the researchers have tested this potentially miraculous technology in a Chilean municipality named Alto Hospicio. Only 1.6 percent of its 10,000-ish residents are connected to the local water system.
The mesh nets are held up by two poles. Moisture in the air that comes in contact with the nets converts into droplets that eventually drain down the nets and into a water tank. I understand that when I described it sounded significantly less like a sci-fi miracle technology, but it’s still pretty clever and innovative.
The researchers demonstrated that 38.61 square miles of fog collectors could bring in somewhere between 0.05 and 1.32 gallons of water per square meter every day, with the higher range of those estimates hitting in August and September.
With a sudden influx of water being pulled out of the air, communities that didn’t have so much access to H2O could suddenly find themselves able to irrigate crops or even just provide enough water to meet the needs of a small settlement’s citizens.
The researchers of course note that you can’t just copy and paste the tech into arid areas all around the world and expect the same results. They note that fog collection currently requires specific geographic conditions like elevated landforms, sustainable wind patterns, and of course, plenty of fog.
But should an area meet those conditions, maybe fog harvesting can help them meet their water needs.
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