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Drinking your own pee for survival: does the science bear it out?
- LinuxBender 6y agoIf you can make a fire and you have a metal container, some copper tubing and another container, you can extract the water from the urine the same way you can remove water from salt-water. Boil the urine in a metal container, connected to copper tubing. The copper tubing needs to be in something cool to convert the steam to water or you will lose it in the atmosphere. If you have a big enough container, this is fine, you basically build a poor-persons distillation setup. This isn't perfect but it doesn't have to be. Another method is reverse osmosis, which is just applying a large amount of pressure and forcing the fluid through a membrane, but this is not practical on the trail.
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoDoesn't ammonia have a lower boiling point than water? You'd have that in the output after distilling I would think.
- LinuxBender 6y agoYes and no because it isnt really ammonia, yet, but you can make it into ammonia. A more complete answer is here [1] Boiling is not perfect, especially if you are doing this with low-tech tools in the wilderness, but it may be good enough to survive. That said, there are many other ways to get water. A big sheet of plastic, a few rocks and digging a hole is one them. (condensation) [1] - https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/54387/extracting-urea-from-urine https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/54387/extracti...