this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
204 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
82000 readers
3597 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.