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kmosiman t1_j20cqga wrote

Reply to comment by Surur in UIUC Researchers propose a new way to get fresh water from seawater, without the disadvantages of traditional desalination. They say that a vertical “capture surface” that is 210 m wide and 100 m tall, could extract enough vapor floating above warm oceans to supply 500,000 people with freshwater by lughnasadh

It would slightly, but I believe the point is that by just collecting and capturing the natural water vapor that this would be no more than normal. Plus wave motion would natural refresh the water in the collection area.

I think the same could be true for pumped membrane desalination except pumping the massive amount of water needed to mix back to normal salinity would make the process more expensive.

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momo_0 t1_j21o5r3 wrote

> I believe the point is that by just collecting and capturing the natural water vapor that this would be no more than normal

I’m no expert, but isn’t it classic human folly to believe that altering one piece of the natural machine would have basically no impact?

Again, not an expert, but couldn’t something like no water vapors -> fewer rain clouds -> less rain in certain areas? Are we just punting the problem elsewhere?

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Notoriouslydishonest t1_j22cys4 wrote

The oceans are very, very big compared to the amount we use.

The US' entire annual water usage is equal to a square 1500 feet by 1500 feet extending down to the offshore ocean basin. Any removal of anything from anything is going to have repercussions, but this is about as low impact as you can get.

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CoolYoutubeVideo t1_j21uibj wrote

The vapor pressure of liquids basically means that for a given pressure, temperature, etc., the liquid will produce a certain amount of vapor. The vapor will replenish itself naturally by evaporation

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theabominablewonder t1_j21qgxc wrote

There would still be a lot of water vapour if it was for small local populations but if it was scaled to produce water for millions then maybe the scale would pose a problem.

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poultran t1_j22dptw wrote

Sounds like a windtrap from the ”Dune” series,

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Ieatsushiraw t1_j22vfzd wrote

Indeed it does. Now if only we had Spice and Stillsuites and Holtzman engines and all the things in Dune minus the medieval bs they decided to revert back to

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YouDontKnowMyLlFE t1_j23oo9r wrote

You know the water still exists on or near the surface of earth after we’re through with it right? We’re not shooting it up into space or shoving it in a wormhole.

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ArtOfWarfare t1_j23t73o wrote

No, but we are filling up plastic bottles (sometimes with sugar or minerals added, other times just pure) with water than shoving those bottles into landfills.

So that does fairly permanently remove water from the water cycle.

Edit: Hm. I guess the bottles only take 450 years to decompose in a landfill. That’s a lot less permanent than I expected. It’s still older than the US, but on a geological/size of the ocean scale it doesn’t seem so bad.

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