Discussion on:

Desalinizing water is expensive, right? Not with this clay pot

Awesome example of design/thinking around the problem.

Only downside is the real driver to save this planet from mankind is a need for overall population reduction. Hopefully this can be implemented in conjunction with Education, Contraception and basic healthcare - as broadly advocated by the Gates Foundation - to reduce off-spring per family.

Their imams want them to breed as fast as possible, to take over the earth's population.

Hi ampman731,

You seem to misinformed about Muslim birth rates, historically they are no different than any other youthful immigrant group, perhaps you have been doing something that is harmful to your brain, like perhaps watching FOX news or listening to Rush Limbaugh?

At any rate go to the following link (if you dare) and let some facts add to your world view, see link;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-saunders/10-myths-about-muslims-in_b_1864589.html#slide=1486857

Scientia Non Domus,
(Knowledge has No Home)

Best wishes,

antiguajohn

this technology has been around for years... ask any Boy Scout that purified urine into drinking water using a solar still built from a bowl, a cup, a rock, and a piece of sheet plastic. (Google Solar Still Plans - Search engines are your friend).

The reason this won't help is that it takes all day to purify 4 ounces of water.

Besides, most people that need to make fresh water don't live by the ocean.

"...it produced five liters of water a day in optimal conditions..."

That is almost two gallons. Hardly "four ounces".

Or perhaps it's those new-fangled "liter" things you're having trouble with?

Real engineers can com up with much better design. Inside the British Museum, a device for making fresh water for plants is displayed and well explained. I plan to commercialize an even better version.

Water turns to steam at the boiling point 212 degrees F. Not many two hundred degree days. The pressure would blow the lid off. $50? I don't think so. I can buy a water purifier for $30 at REI. Who carries seawater out to the middle of a field? This article does not hold water.

So you've never seen a puddle evaporate after a rain shower? Or seen the rain evaporate off your car? At any temperature there are molecules of water that move fast enough to enter the gaseous state. Even ice sublimates. It's just a matter of statistics.

In many places of the world, the issue is not availability of water, but the fact that it is briny or polluted. Evaporation would work just as well here.

Thanks for the lesson of evaporation, what's that have to do with this?

Water doesn't have to boil in order to evaporate. Otherwise your skin would have to get to 100 C in order for the sweat to evaporate and cool you. All that is required for evaporation to occur is that the relative humidity is less than 100%.

How about these people stop reproducing if you live in an area where there is no water available to drink. Send them 3.6 million contraceptives. This would solve two problems: Suffering of their offspring and global overpopulation.

I'm troubled by the idea that poor people or those not near drinakble water shouldn't breed. Maybe people with such ignorant idea shouldn't breed?

but it's true that when people live on the edge of hunger and thirst, when a technological or other improvement comes along, the population just increases to the point where they're on the edge of famine again. It happened in the Green Revolution of the 1960s in which Western techniques were introduced to 3rd world agriculture, crop yields increased, and people had more children until they became approximately as bad off as they were before. It's only human nature and it will probably always happen this way unless family size limits are enforced somehow, as repugnant as that may seem.

Those Western agricultural techniques gave big yields at first, but they require ever-increasing inputs of agricultural chemicals to maintain those yields. They deplete the organic matter in the soil, making it less able to retain water and nutrients and more prone to compaction. In years with drought or excessive rain, yields can be worse even when plenty of chemical fertilizer is used. The soil also erodes more easily.

Where those methods took hold, after a number of year farmers had worn-out soil and were broke - plus, they had more mouths to feed. There was more to it than you are seeing, the "green revolution" farming methods are simply not sustainable in the third world. Not sustainable here, either, for that matter; the whole system is on the verge of collapse.

How the hell did this veer off into a bunch of rants on overpopulation? The answer to overpopulation is education. Women who are empowered by education have fewer children.

1) as the general health of the population increases
2) as infant and maternal mortality decreases
3) as levels of maternal education increase

This device addresses item 1. The other items are different issues.

These people have large families to support them in old age when they can no longer work or become sick.
I was told by a white hunter that lived in Africa for many years that sex while very hungry was very good, and there was nothing else to do at night! I hope I never have to with out choice experience this personally.

If you are using the Huffington Post as your source of information then you are just as ideologically tainted as anyone who watches Rush or Fox.

It never ceases to amaze me that the left wing progressive? people (people who expouse pro femminist and pro homosexual agendas) continue to defend Islam and Muslims while Islamists routinely repress and opress women and children, and execute homosexuals.

It is a world fact that the population growth in Islamic countries is outpacing that of the west. It is a tenent of Islam to reproduce at a higher rate to try and spread Islam over the world.

Lastly, Where does one dump the brine solution left over. This must be careully considered since dumping it back into the water supply is very counterproductive.

You need:
Wet dirt or ground and/or water/urine/seawater/green vegetation.
A way to scoop a hole in the dirt.
A square meter or two of clear plastic.
A container, open topped.
Plastic tubing (optional)
Smallish rock. 200-300gms.

Scoop out hole maybe 30cm smaller in diameter than the plastic sheet.
Bury about half of the sheet's edge along the top of the hole.
dump water containing fluids/vegetation around the center of the hole, leaving room for you container.

Insert end of optional plastic tubing into pot, bring other end outside of the edge of the hole.

Bury the rest of the plastic sheet edging at the edge of the hole (rocks/pebbles/dirt)

Place rock on sheeting and it will move to center. Wait as container fills with water condensed off of the sheet.

Clear plastic sheeting is nearly ubiquitous around the world, make sure that the piece you choose is clean and was not used to wrap toxic materials.

Total cost: $0 + 1/2hr time assuming you have a container (plastic bottles are also ubiquitous around the world, but any clean container will work, so long as you have a large enough opening so the condensate falls into the container.

plant could be set up right. A company could sell the water and the salt.

cashews, Expansion into space would solve what you describe.