Thursday, April 07, 2016

Funding Bullshit


It would seem that a basic lack of science knowledge among investors has helped propel a kick-starter campaign to $1 million in funds even though the basic premise of the product is demonstrably bullshit. The product in question is called "Triton" (I won't link to it) and its maker claims it filters Oxygen from water at a sufficient rate that a human being can breath underwater. The amount of water that contains enough oxygen (assuming 100% extraction efficiency) for a person to breathe is roughly 100 liters per minute or 1.7 liters per second; a pump that can do that would weight about 2 kilo and need 100 watts of power, as you can see in the picture this device is about the size of a golf ball! Not only is this physically impossible without some major star trek technology it completely ignores the fact that you need to recycle the carbon dioxide you breath since the concentration of this is the way your body regulates breathing, i.e. no CO2 then no regulation, you would hyperventilate and die. The military-industrial complex has been trying to come up with a device like this for years and they have budgets of billions; the best we have are big clumsy re-circulation devices that involve all kinds of noxious chemicals. What are the chances of some shady guy in Korea suddenly cracking all of these technical problems at once and fabricating a device with crowd-sourced funding, I'd calculate the likely probability as half way between -1 and 1.

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