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Comment by dieg0 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, you can extract water from air. You have just re-invented distillation, in a painfully mind blowing way.

In Chile we have the driest desert on earth, the Atacama desert, this projects have “tried” to address the challenge of getting fresh water in remote communities located in such places. State funds have been directed toward similar "science" projects. TV has dedicated time and resources to explore this "idea".

This has to stop, the amount of water that you can extract from air is related to the amount of humidity in that place's air. You don't need much to understand that the amount of water in the air isn't much in places such as deserts. And if you have lots of humidity in the air, you can probably get water from other sources, such as rain.

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You said it yourself, the Atacama is the driest desert on earth. I imagine that environment would be the most difficult to extract water from.

Develop the tech in easier locales then, once the major details are worked out, target the outliers.

Air already has X amount of water, you cannot get more than X. It doesn't matter if X is very tiny like in deserts or very large like in the middle of the pacific ocean.

Per cubic meter, sure, but there is a lot more of it than that to work with

We build our space equipment the same way... arrange for/synthesize/simulate a close analogue of an environment for initial development and then move on to the real thing once the initial quirks are solved. I certainly don't know the science behind water extraction but I imagine an extremely dry locale would not be the best place to be performing all your validation tests. Maybe start with a kind-of-dry desert, or some other biome. Like Joshua Tree instead of Death Valley...

I meant "these" projects. Not this project specifically

Develop industry that produces steam upwind!

Did you read the article at all? This applies to places under 50% humidity, not just deserts.

You are absolutely right. No matter how many down-votes you receive. The scientific illiteracy on HN is astounding considering the audience it tries to cater to (college-educated software engineers).

It really is astounding. About the wettest the atmosphere can get is a rain cloud and one several kilometres in height and several kilometres in length will drop a few millimetres of water. Yet people seriously believe that these little things will suck more water out of much less atmosphere.

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