The Dune movies have become absolute sensations over the past couple of years, bringing science fiction to movie theaters all around the world - and inspiring a whole lot of people.
YouTube is absolutely full of channels building unbelievable gadgets and completing unlikely projects, and one of the most popular enthusiast channels out there is Hacksmith Industries, which just turned its attention to the Dune universe.
Its team were particularly interested in stillsuits, the made-up technology that allows many of Dune's characters to survive on impossible desert planets without water.
The idea is that the suit is an unbelievably efficient water recycler, one that can harvest every drop of sweat from your body, filter it and produce clean water for you to drink, ensuring that you lose almost no water and can therefore survive longer.
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Hacksmith Industries set out to see if it could build a homemade version of a stillsuit, and to make things even harder, they only gave themselves a single day to do so in.
Amazingly, over the course of an interesting video that contains some fascinating details for the amateur engineers among us, they actually manage to do a pretty good job.
They start by taking an off-the-shelf Dune costume and modifying it with Tyvek, a durable and lightweight fabric that has waterproof properties, making it a great way to seal the suit completely.
The team then added in a thermoelectric cooler, a device that condenses water vapor from the air inside the suit, a solid way to harvest any vapor floating around in its crevices.
The suit's mask then needed a respirator to get fresh air in, while it was also a bit of a challenge to make a sort of water storage bladder for all this vapor to collect in once condensed, and to channel everything toward it.
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Once this was ready, though, it was a simple matter of running a drinking tube up to the suit's mask, and then one of the team tried it out to see how it worked.
Impressively, it does seem functional, and the water collection worked just as designed, producing water that the tester said was perfectly fine, albeit pretty warm.
Luckily, they did build in a four-stage filter for the water to go through, since no one wants to actually drink their own sweat if they can avoid it.
The end result, then, is extremely impressive for a one-day build, and while it might be bulkier, hotter and less refined than the costumes in the Dune movies, it's got the advantage of at least mostly working. Give them a few years to develop it, and you never know how good this stillsuit could get.