I drink a lot of coke - and therefore make a lot of trips to the bathroom. Brown liquid goes in; thirty minutes later, pure, clean water comes out.
Say a third-world villager trains his cow to walk down to the fetid, parasite-laden, water hole, drink as much as it can hold, walk back to the hut, and pee into a trough. And do this all day.
Has the guy procured himself a supply of safe, tasty, drinking water?
Urine does carry all the toxins that the cow’s body didn’t want to keep around.
But, the urine will A) be sterile (which is probably all that matters in your scenario) and B) some of the toxins will have been broken down by the cow’s liver.
So cow urine has its pluses. But in the end, YOU HAVE A FUCKING COW. Go milk it for crissakes.
Your physiology must be extraordinarily different from most human beings. If you are peeing pure water, the urea from the breakdown of proteins and any excess salt in your diet must be accumulating in your blood, and you will die very shortly.
If your only source of water is urine, which contains urea, you’ll dehydrate and die in short order.
I think he means he’s overhydrating. His urine is very dilute and mostly pure water.
Even if it wasn’t so dilute, drinking urine won’t make you dehydrate. You can easily drink average urine, piss doubly-concentrated urine, and get by happily. Urine isn’t sea water.
I’ve heard tell that North European Shamanic types used Reindeer as a filtration system of sorts - feeding the deer Fly Agaric mushrooms, then drinking the urine to have a less toxic, but hallucinatory effect.
OK, my original OP was a little flippant, but I think I’ve got a decent idea here: biofilters for water purification. Animals bred or genetically engineered to over-drink and “excrete” water could filter out toxins and parasites from unclean water perhaps more cheaply, efficiently, and maintainably in underdeveloped countries than technological systems. It’s not inconceivable that we could even have bio-desalinization. Any thoughts?
How would maintaining herds of bio-engineered animals be cheaper and more effective than simply boiling the source water?
I do wonder how pure you can make that water. Any big animal we have is going to require energy just to live, so it’l metabolize stuff and produce urea that has to be gotten rid of somehow. Water is the best way for lots of reasons. So it’ll take in water and emit water with urea.
Whales, of course, can take in salt water and use that, but that doesn’t mean they excrete pure water – they excrete salt water (I think) with urea in it.
I suppose it might be possible to engineer some sorta creature that takes in salt water and puts its waste (salt and urea) into its solid waste, and pees out water, or water with minimal contaminants, but that’s VERY much unlike the way anything’s metabolism works. It feels like trying to drive thermodynamics backwards. at best, i suspect it will be extremely difficult.
Apparently cow urine is drinkable. Some people even drink it for fun.
What’s the nutrition content of urine, btw? I imagine it might be quite rich in water-soluble vitamins.
I think there’s a huge potential for bio- or nano- filtration systems to improve on modern methods. On the other hand, most people in the world could be helped with existing technologies that cost just pennies or dollars per person. Someone invented a high-tech “straw” that costs about $1 per person and does filter out the worst toxins and parasites from tainted water. (It’s sort of like a Brita filter in a straw). $1 per person per month is all it would take (if memory serves)… but we’re talking about countries where that’s 10% of a family’s income for the year.
So the real problem is not technology, it’s poverty.
What about using the cow as a first step filter then using a fire to evaporate & condense the water vapour? I realise that if you have a condenser, step a is possibly redundant but there may be nasties in the water you want to attempt have the cow filtrate.
If the water is too dangerous for a human to safely drink wouldn’t it also kill the cow? I suppose that’s better than dying yourself (except from the cow’s point of view) but a dead cow won’t produce any safe water for you to drink. This method might work for water that was only marginally bad but cow urine won’t be a big improvement over river water.