Sunday, October 05, 2008

Mazda is desiging cars for a water starved future

link
The Kiyora has one very unique feature--rain water is channeled from the roof through a carbon filter, filling up a bottle between the front seats. This is the car for a water-starved future.
It's good that they're thinking ahead, but they're designing for a water-starved future with a lot of rain. They should have run this past the system engineers.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's actually rather funny.

Isn't an oil-starved future more likely, in which case, if the car is only going to stay in the driveway anyway, why not just buy the filter without the car?

Rionn Fears Malechem said...

They're both pretty likely -- if there's no ice, and the soil can't hold water, it seems like it's going to be hard to get. I don't know how much it'll rain on Fogball Earth, but I wouldn't bank on it's being a lot.

On the other hand, Mad Max had both. What did he do for water?

Anonymous said...

Suck blood?

Isn't that what they do in Turkana?

Fogball Earth...nothing like the sound of a horn through the mist to stir up emotions in a nephologist.

Word on the street though is that relative humidity isn't supposed to change, just absolute humidity. So, maybe the cars are being built for the oil-rich, descending branch of the Hadley Cell parts of the world.

Anonymous said...

Here's a helpful chart of the vapor pressure of water at different temperatures. If the humidity in the air goes up like this chart, absolute humidity will increase while relative humidity stays the same.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Water_vapor_pressure_graph.jpg

Rionn Fears Malechem said...

The Turkana drink the blood of goats in the same way that the Maasai drink the blood of cows. 'Suck' kind of implies they put their lips right on the animal, but there is generally at least one intermediate step.

Anonymous said...

Well, as with the blood-sucking, issues are a little more subtle with the water vapor. But, at the risk of being pedantic, a risk incidentally that I'm always willing to take, I think the way it probably goes is that fog-world would represent 100% Relative Humidity everywhere, but that's not likely because the general circulation requires downward as well as upward motion. Like in the deserts, where fogs just are kind of hard to make because of overall subsidence.

Maybe RH reflects the circulation, but as your plot shows, absolute humidity can still go up as temperature rises. Nonetheless the world average relative humidity is well constrained at something less than 100% alas.

I still really like the idea of fog world though...I so wanna believe, Malechem.

Rionn Fears Malechem said...

We'll just sit tight and wait for you to work out the theoretical details of why it's inevitable, then. I'm more of a 'big picture' guy.

Anonymous said...

Malechem commands...

So in a last ditch effort to save humanity from the worst of global warming, an all out effort is made to cool the planet by spewing extraordinarily vast quantities of pollution particles into the atmosphere, under the guise that this would block the surface from the sun's menacing rays, offering us some respite.

But, as sure as linking Obama to Ayers, it backfires. Much like Venus, the pollution makes cloud droplets so small that they can no longer stick together when they collide, effectively eliminating the primary means for raindrop production, and the primary removal mechanism for atmospheric condensate.

Soon the whole worlds clouds over, making for a hot, dank, muddy soup of a planet in which Mazda's newly designed cars become the only means available for collecting water.

The world releases a collective sigh, realizing, simultaneously, that if it had only listened to Malechem, none of this would ever have happened.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Nephos! I think the particle dispersion idea is particularly crazy, but the cliamte engineers are all over it.

I should correct that Fogball Earth, as originally coined, just referred to a lot of atmospheric moisture. It was more euphonic than 'Cloudball Earth,' and I was thinking about the view from space.