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.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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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.
Well the damage is done and now we need that water.
Finally, I can achieve my dreams of becoming a moisture farmer.
Hope you enjoy a whiny nephew
I swear to god if that kid brings up the academy one more time, just kill me
But crying about not getting to go to Tashii station is okay?
Shut the FUCK up we have a shed literally full of power converters, your friends are absolute trash anyway and come on what kind of name even is "Biggs Darklighter" it sounds like his parents were from a Flash Gordon ripoff
What
In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker was raised by Anakin's step brother, Owen Lars, who was a moisture farmer on Tatooine. That made him Luke's step uncle. We're all referencing Star Wars quotes.
You know the kid with the unhealthy obsession with womp rats
Little psychopath just bull's-eyeing 'em all day long in his T-16
Peaceful living as a smoldering skeleton
Where's my blue milk?
That water was in its way to somewhere, though. What is that other area gonna look like now that this device intercepts the water?
Dooooom
Someone is going to drink it then sweat it back into the air. I doubt its going to get bottled and shipped somewhere else.
Eventually all that dry air will end up above the ocean and absorb more water to balance the system. I don't think it's really an issue, we weren't getting rain clouds from the Sahara anyway.
Sounds like that other area needs to pull up on those bootstraps and make a water machine for its needs then.
This comment is brought to you by the sigma water machine, buy yours today and lock your grindset on hydration!
(Hopefully obvious but /s)
Are you on the Temu or the Amazon so that I can get some good boot straps and choke myself to ejaculation?
Lisan al-Gaib!
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Bruh.
This is likely not the Generative AI, LLM-slop type of AI you're thinking of.
I hate generative AI. But other forms of AI and machine learning have been used for much longer and haven't facilitated the building of ecologically harmful datacenters.
For example, AlphaFold, which is an AI program that can predict how proteins fold and is an incredibly useful tool.
I expect that the use of AI here would be similar: something trained for a specific purpose, not just generic generative AI tech like ChatGPT
I was researching ai before llms for a gen ed class, this isn't the sensationalized type of ai, ai in medicine and sht is pretty cool. Hospitality ai is getting too good too fast tho. Robot hotels and restaurants would not be suprising.
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/new-ai-tool-pinpoints-genes-drug-combos-restore-health-diseased-cells
Reading that felt like my brain was trying to chew glue
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
That's what it said.
shipping container size
That’s far smaller than I expected. I also don’t imagine it will be cheap. If they manage to make it less than $100,000 then I’ll be baffled. Less than $500,000 and I’ll be excited for the possibilities in my lifetime.
$500,001
"booooring"
I mean, a little. It’s far easier to sell someone on less than half a million than on more than half a million.
sorry but isn't that just a good dehumidifier? Is there something new?
And how much power does it use?
This thing works self-contained and off grid - using materials that have huge surfaces to condense the water. It is mentioned that there are powered versions too, but the principle itself does not need extra power, the Sun drives the condensation.
That's still embodied energy, so the question becomes; "How much energy does it take to actually make these materials?"
In particular, the device is packed with Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), which are synthetic porous materials engineered at the molecular level to have huge surface areas. A few grams of an MOF can have a surface area equivalent to a football arena, according to the source.
That sounds pretty energy-intensive to me.
Sun: no more free power for you click
Every living thing as eternal darkness consumes us: AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH
Cool!
Yaghi’s mechanism can do this without a power source. It uses the wind and air for water input, then the sun to drive condensation and evaporative action.
Really interesting. This could totally transform many places on Earth.
When I looked at condensers in the past, they weren't incredibly energy-efficient. I suspect that it's cheaper in the long run to do desalination and build a pipeline to wherever inland you want freshwater, unless you have very limited-in-scale need.
This (seemingly) solves some issues in places like Africa where warlords block or destroy delivery systems to remote villages. Also fixes disaster recovery where pipes are destroyed or water systems are contaminated