this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
579 points (95.9% liked)
Technology
82087 readers
3779 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Technically yes! To put it in perspective, there's about 2.5kg of water in the atmosphere per m^2 of earth surface area. If you put enough panels across the earth, you could probably do a decent job at taking some of the water out of the air.
We have to look at another factor affecting the water in the air. As we take water out of the air, it's not really a finite resource. Most water in the air generally comes from the sun evaporating the oceans. If we take the water out of the air, the sun will put the water back. There's always a balance of humidity and quantity evaporated. When the humidity is lower, the sun would have an easier time evaporating more water due to the osmosis of the water from the source (ocean) going into the air. Osmosis is a kind of log graph, so even if the humidity is lower, the exponential tail means the solar evaporation and humidity pretty much balances out at the end of the day.
It's similar thing to taking water from a river. If we take all the water from a river, can we dry up downstream? Yes! But considering the height of the atmosphere, it's like standing at the edge of the river trying with a bucket and trying to scoop everything up. Unless these water-from-air harvesters can reach all the way to the clouds, we probably won't dry anything up.
Thanks for your answer! I feel like that makes sense on a global scale, but mightn't local and regional scales be more impacted? We already know that the transpiration from forests affects rain patterns, and the forests don't need to be huge either.
Also, some ecosystems might be particularly vulnerable. For example, redwood trees actually absorb most of their water through their leaves from fog and mist. Could a local humidity harvesting plant potentially pull enough water from the air that the osmotic pressure is reduced below what redwoods need to absorb water? I suspect the answer is actually no for this particular examole, but my point is that powerful technologies like these must be thought through, especially if someone is claiming zero side effects. The time is long past for humanity to learn a little caution with potential climate changing technologies.
Not that I think your device has the same danger because water captured from the air will likely quickly be released again into the same air, but I think this is not a very good example of the safety of your device:
We can and we do. The Colorado and the Yellow river no longer consistently reach the ocean.