Why Strive to Make Wind and Air a Universal Local Source of Freshwater?

Albert Einstein’s definition of Insanity, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results”, applies well to the mindset with which we continue our attempts to solve the worldwide water crisis. This mindset continues to lay the blame on inadequate commitment and resources and crazy priorities while increasing the volume of the message that catastrophe is imminent.

It’s time we tried something different. It’s time we made a paradigm shift in our thinking and started seeing the forest instead of just the trees! My comprehensive definition of the water crisis is: Not having the right quantity and quality of water where we must have it

Rabbit … OR … Duck?

Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, used this illustration to make the point that if we can see things in a different way (i.e. if we can interpret and receive different messages from the same information set) we may be able to do something different.

Simply speaking, once we see things differently, we usually will act differently. But we need to see things differently to ever think of acting differently.

The Elephant and the Blind Men

The illustration tells the story – The blind men (or men in the dark of night) do not agree with each other on what an elephant is, because they only use the single part they have touched as the basis of their opinion of what the elephant is.

Our interpretation of the water crisis is similar to the story of these blind men. We each have seen only the tiniest part of the water crisis and have worked to solve it (with good diligence and worthy results) while we each, in parallel, turn up the volume of our messages of pessimism, catastrophe and a lack of commitment and resources.

THE FULL & BIG Picture

When we define the water crisis as Not having the right quantity and quality of water where we must have it, and look around for a solution, we quickly find that:

1.  Air is a medium that contains freshwater

2.  Air is present everywhere

3.  Air, as Wind, can move water anywhere

4.  Air contains orders of magnitude more freshwater than we will ever need 

5.  Freshwater on the ground is replenished REGULARLY and ONLY through nature’s process of rainfall and precipitation

6.  Nature's Hydrological cycle replenishes freshwater supplies in the air regularly

Isn't it time we worked earnestly to harvest water from the Air and the Wind?

Image sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift; purpleserendipity.wordpress.com

  

Can Living Things Make Water?

Making water by combining its components, oxygen and hydrogen, requires a process we know very well from Chemistry textbooks, However, we do not know how to control this process in a way to safely manage the large amount of energy that the process releases. (see post dated November 9, 2010).Aerobic RespirationAll living things (Animals, humans, fungi, algae, bacteria and plants) breathe i.e. take in oxygen from the environment. Their body's biological process breaks down glucose in tissues to release energy.

This process can be over-simplistically described by the following equation:

  Glucose + Oxygen = Carbon Dioxide + Water + Energy

and chemically represented as follows:

   C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6 O₂     →     6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O  +  Energy

As shown in the above equation, this process creates water as a by-product while releasing energy in the form of ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate)

ATP is the main energy source for cell functions. About 30 molecules of ATP are produced from oxidation of 1 molecule of glucose. Some of the water released hydrolyzes ATP to ADP but the rest remains as water in a cell.

If we could synthetically perform the above, we will be creating water using a biological process that Nature perfected a long long time ago.Of course, the biological process of aerobic Respiration is not as simple as shown above and is better represented as follows:

This is the challenge faced by the emerging science of Synthetic Biology when the task is to replicate, scale up and commercially extract water from the atmosphere.

Image Sources: Solarnavigator.net; library.thinkquest.org, Wikipedia

Nature's Water Purification Cycle

Water, the source of all life of the kind we know on Earth, is always in movement naturally – it is perpetually moving to a different location and changing its form. The energy source for this continuous never-ending transformation is sunlight.

The Water Cycle

The figure on the right displays Nature's 4-process Water Cycle (also known as the Hydrological cycle).

The four processes are: 

• Evaporation & Transpiration - this process removes salts and other ingredients from seawater and delivers pure fresh drinking water (as water vapor) into the atmosphere
• Vapor Transport - this process ensures that the pure fresh drinking water is available everywhere
• Precipitation (Condensation) - this process deposits the pure drinking water on the ground and facilitates a process called Chemical Weathering that scrubs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and is part of Nature's Carbon Cycle
• Surface and ground runoff - this process adds the results of the precipitation process into the Ocean

All of these processes are in various stages of progression at any one time time everywhere around the world.

Drinking Water

Water, fit for consumption by humans, animal, insect and plant life, is available in the atmosphere.

The appropriate name of the Water Cycle is Water Purification Cycle.

Water From Air using ADSORPTION

The old adage “drops of water make an ocean” also applies to making AIR a universal source of fresh water – all that needs done is extract the first drop of water from air and then just keep adding new drops after they are extracted, onto the first drop.

A water drop on a glass surface

The first water drop will look somewhat like the photograph (on the left) of a water droplet placed on a glass surface using a bulb dropper. In this photograph, the water droplet is not adhering in any way to the surface of the glass.


This photograph is, however, representative of a phenomenon that exists in both Chemistry and Biology called Adsorption.


Adsorption is the physical adherence of a material (the adsorbate, in either gas or liquid or solid form) onto a surface of another material (the adsorbent)usually by "bonding"  of ions, atoms, molecules or biomolecules between the two materials. 

Adsorbate Molecules on Adsorbent Surface 

Adsorption results in increasing the total volume. Atoms on the surface of the adsorbent attract the adsorbate atoms and, thus, a layer of the adsorbate is created on the surface of the adsorbent. In reality the picture is more like the illustration on the right. Water, as adsorbate behaves exactly in a similar manner but its structure is not so well ordered


Water Clustering
A unique property of water, due its unique physical molecules, is that water molecules cluster in nearly an infinite number of shapes, two of which are shown in the following illustration:

This ability to cluster and form new chemical forms gives water many of its unique properties. Desiccants (like silica gel) use adsorption to remove water from air.


Adsorption in Biology
In the Science of Virology, the adhesion of a substance to an organic particle, e.g. the adhesion of a virus to a cell, is also known as Adsorption. 


In Chemistry the adhesion is fueled by chemical bonds (e.g. by water's hydrogen bonds) while in Virology, viruses adsorb to their host cell surface via specific anti-receptor molecules, often glycoproteins. One example of glycoproteins found in the human body is mucins, which are secreted in the mucus of the respiratory and digestive tracts, where sugars attach to the mucins and give then considerable water-holding capacity.


It still remains to be seen if glycoproteins, and its brethren,can be used to extract water from the air in considerable volume!


Photo Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsorption
http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/abstrct.html#min

Water and Happy New Year

The Best of Wishes,

for Manna from Heaven,

for one and all,

in Twenty-Eleven!

I send these wishes out at the New Year of the Georgian Calendar, but the significance of water to all life on Earth is well known and celebrated, albeit at different dates, by different cultures and peoples. 

Thales (~650 B.C.)

Water's purification and cleansing properties are celebrated by all religions in their own individual ways. 

Water also figures prominently in each of our myths of creation. Many traditions begin with the Earth being retrieved from an ocean or all living creatures surviving a flood . 

One philosopher (Thales, around 650 BC) even believed that all matter could be traced back to a single substance that, he opined, was water.

Making sense of the unknown through something intimately familiar is an art we even practice today. In years past, the most familiar entity to everyone was WATER!