I live in Arizona where our seasons are hot, hotter and hottest. But even though we’re used to dealing with extreme heat there’s still cause for concern this week with an early season heat wave set to send temperature soaring past 110 degrees, shattering records for early June.
It’s a sign of things to come for the Earth in the summer of 2024. Mexico has already seen record temperatures and with ocean temperatures exceeding 90 degrees off the coast of Florida it’s expected that we’ll have a record setting Atlantic hurrican season this year featuring at least 24 named storms.
We’re obviously trending in the wrong direction when it comes to Climate Change as the world gets hotter and hotter, year after year. We’re going to need to turn to technology to help us mitigate the damage we’ve already caused and help us survive the new, harsher environment. Which means we could very well wind up needing to create Dune style stillsuits, capable of recycling our body’s water to keep us hydrated. As it turns out, we’re already doing just that.
Futurism explains:
“In Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 sci-fi novel ‘Dune,’ those adventurous enough to brave the desert landscapes of the fictional planet Arrakis wear a full body suit called a ‘stillsuit‘ that can preserve all of the body’s moisture with the help of a filter that recycles both sweat and urine.
A tube inserted into the wearer’s nostrils, as dramatized in the 2021 blockbuster adaptation and its more recent sequel, can replenish the wearer’s water levels without depending on an external source of the precious liquid.
While the concept is fictional, engineers at the YouTube channel The Hacksmith recently tried to create their own stillsuit using surprisingly simple technology — and as it turns out, it’s not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds.
While the DIY stillsuit doesn’t look nearly as sleek as the one portrayed in the 2021 film adaptation — it’s essentially a Tyvek suit with an off-the-rack Dune costume worn on top of it — the engineers did manage to collect the body’s moisture and allow team member Darryl Sherk to drink it through a tube.
The team used a thermoelectric cooler, which is a small gridded device that can cool a computer or other appliances by running an electrical charge through two different types of metal.
The cold side of the device stayed inside the suit, attracting moisture in the trapped air, not unlike a dehumidifier.
Meanwhile a drinking bladder, combined with an in-line water filter purchased from the local sports supplies store, collected the resulting water and allowed Sherk to suck it up like a straw.
The strange contraption apparently led to plenty of questions around The Hacksmith’s HQ.
‘Everybody keeps thinking I’m drinking my own pee,’ Sherk complained in the video.”
Hopefully, we can reverse Climate Change and won’t wind up needing to actually invent Stillsuits but it’s promising to know that we can make them if needed.
Will we soon have Stillsuits?
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