Sunday, March 17, 2013

Rising Seas? No Problem?

Are you one of the devoutists who believes that global warming will cause the seas to rise?  No problem!  Now we can drink the sea water, use it to water the deserts, and keep sea level at its current place :-)
Cheap, clean water may soon be available for the whole planet. According to Reuters, defense contractor Lockheed Martin has developed a filter that will hugely reduce the amount of energy necessary to turn sea water into fresh water. The filter, which is five hundred times thinner then others currently available, lets water pass through but blocks all salt molecules. It will use almost 100 times less energy than other methods for making salt water drinkable, giving third world countries another way of expanding access to drinking water without having to create costly pumping stations.
I love technology.

5 comments:

PeggyU said...

Beautiful!!! I had a feeling someone would create an efficient, inexpensive desalination method soon, since the need is there. :)

Left Coast Ref said...

Awesome. I hope it is truly effective. Interesting that it was Lockheed Martin, an Aerospace company!

Mike Thiac said...

Darren, what the hell are you thinking. All these leaches who have invested so much in the sky is falling scenarios like global cooling, err global warming..., oh yea, climate change will simple make an adjustment. You can hear it not, "Irrigating the desert will killing tens of millions of indigenous life forms, we will be destroying the bio-spear, etc..." Remember, these people have got to protect their phony baloney jobs!

KauaiMark said...

I worked for Lockheed Martin as a software contractor for a few years way back when.

They do get to work on neat some stuff!

allen (in Michigan) said...

Uh, not to rain on anyone's parade, so to write but...

Lockheed still faces a number of challenges in moving to production

I think I'll wait for the first pilot plant at least before hailing this technological triumph.

With that caveat out of the way though, poor Malthus' ideas were buried a long, loooong time ago. Even before Malthus himself as Malthus support of restrictions on the import of cheap American corn demonstrates. But graphene's very new stuff and taming it may prove to be a tougher chore then a press release might indicate.

As far as the "in your face" to greenie-weenies, they don't care. If one particular crusade is rendered moot they'll find another crusade.