Thank you for easily explaining technology from 20,000 years in the future.

The books obviously handwave a lot, but it isn't "purification" or "distillation". It's Recycling of water. It's implied that it's not exactly pleasant or "good" water, but it is potable. You also wouldn't want to purify the water too much, as you would die from hyponatremia pretty fast. There are hints that the suit uses piezo electric "fabrics" that "leech" power from the user, so your movements could power a mild osmotic filtration system. There's also mention of mechanical systems like heel-insert "pumps". It also doesn't explicitly mention it, but it is implied that solid waste and some other "functions" need "maintenance" regularly. Which would again, get this closer to relative reality. Remember that it's meant to make you last longer, not indefinitely.

"still suits" are a bit of a misnomer in that they don't boil water like a still, but instead use reverse Ozzy Osbourne to purify water thru membraneous layers.

You can distill water by vacuum distillation, which works at body temp or lower.

Also a universe where gravity manipulation is so mundane they use it to make floating lights called Glow Globes.

Although they are called "stillsuits" they do not recycle water through the distillation process, it is explained in the book, and in at least one movie, that human movement pumps the water, in other words, these suits use a reverse osmosis system.

Whole movie i thought of them as STIHLsuits. And imagined them as the desert fashion of Carhartt

"They're just impractical and they'd be a lot bulkier." That's how every technology starts. We might be surprised how quickly it could be developed if there were a genuine need for it.

Yesterdays coffee is today's coffee...

In the books they process your #2s also. Mmm mmm mmm. Crazy future reverse osmosis?

Honestly I think 90% of sci-fi tech is just tech we already have but shrunk wayyyy down until it can be carried easily (and incorporated into a cool outfit)

I mean, it sounds like we’re about 200-300 years off from a practical movie replication then, if it is physically possible. Maybe another 50-100 years before they’re broadly affordable. So it sounds reasonable that a sci-fi story set over 200 centuries in the future would be able to have this sort of technology be real and available

Stepping foot outside of a spaceship has to be one of the scariest fucking things imaginable

Don't worry, we have 10,000 years or so to try and figure it out.

EVA suits actually use rebreather systems, so Astronauts aren't carrying all the oxygen they need but they are carrying some supplementary oxygen.

We have membranes which can purify water. That technology probably makes more sense for a wearable suit than a centrifuge.

If i recall correctly, from having read the books in the 70s, stillsuits were mostly powered by heel pumps, that are then powered by walking. Tho , i think, there would still be a thermodynamics problem. We cool off by sweating and then having that sweat evaporate .The only way to retain that water would be if that evaporation is diminished or reversed. This would diminish or reverse the cooling regardless of whatever extra energy is added via heel pumps or whatever.

curiously though, perhaps stillsuits would work, the walking provides the pump action, the heat is provided by the ambient heat of dune amplified by walking and pumping and the black color, absorbing the heat of the sun. If there is some portion of the stillsuit that effectively boils the water, depositing it in to catch pockets, then hypothetically you could make one, but it would be impractical in anything but the equator or a place like the sahara. Even then it would only work well out on the sand, in the sun, and not at night.

I wanna say Herbert got the idea partly from space suits? And partly for how people in the African desert handle water. The way they work is fascinating. And for being Sci fi if we follow how they work in the books I’m sure someone could make a type of stillsuits

I'd like to point out that the planet's heat is part of the mechanism of the suit to distill the water. If the astronauts were exposed to the heat of the planet in dune, then the engineering might be less difficult.

Hacksmith: “hold my lightsaber”

Given their use in desert environments, maybe the energy problem is handled by solar and/or thermal power?

Great vid

We already have stillsuites, we call it a skin

Amazing tune as always.

Are we forgetting that Dune is science FICTION and not a documentary?

And thats what makes it a good scifi. Simple relatable tech

You need the Toss It project 100%

The hacksmith made their own official stillsuit and worked just had warm liquid to drink

Tricked me with the thumbnail of chris hadfield

The density suits the Larkin had, now that was a trip

Slow Sand filtration could be put inside compression suits found on scuba suits if you sewed them together properly.

So, technology today is just Gigantic version of the technology of the future

Wow, I first read Dune over 40 years ago and in all that time I have never tripped on the fact that the “still” in stillsuit stood for distill.

I never thought about water on the space station until now.

Remember dune takes place 10,000’s of thousands of years into the future. We don’t have holtzman drives either yet

I remember seeing an edited pic of that astronaut holding a fat bag of nug in space

We had the technology to make computers back then, but it was the size of a room. When the size isn't small enough, our technology isn't ready. But I get what he says. I just wanted to clarify.

Gotta do something to get the chlorine out. Distilling doesnt get it out very well.

In the books, their faces were completely covered so as to not lose moisture even from there. Of course in a movie where the actors are paid millions of dollars, they're going to want them to show their faces regardless of how true they want to be to the book lol

I never thought about it until now but taking a shit in space has to be impractical, terrifying, and messy.

Damn. We’re almost close to create that sort of Suit… that **would’ve made a power Armor.**

To be fair, the space station is in space, where recycling water will be much harder. It's also really cool

I bet Stillsuits would make use of the extreme ambient heat to help lower the cost of heating the water

We need to figure out to make them to survive a scorching temperatures that are gonna be common by the end of the century.

Well Dune does take place a good many thousands of years in our future so it looks like we’re honestly on track to make something like a still suit well ahead of schedule with continued technological advancement.

This is a common mistake: Still suits are actually named after their inventor, Leonard Still.

Hacksmith industry made a still suit. It's a bit impractical but very cool.

They use the dessert heat to steam off water and other fluids for cooling the body like in part 2

The OG chads will know that this is actually Subnautica science.

I mean the biggest thing dune neglects is when your body sweats or anything, you are losing more than just water, so not only do you need to replenish the other things your body is losing, but you’d need to dispose of the old stuff. If you just keep sweating in a still suit salt will crystalize and build up layers. In fact, that happens in real life. If you are out in hot weather and just keep sweating, and the sweat evaporates, you can get a pretty bad rash from minerals crystalizing on your skin.

If the stillsuits worked with distillation, it’d probably be a lot more comfortable to wear. The method used by the Fremen to extract water from the bodies of foes is probably similar to what’s used in their suits and that doesn’t get impurities out, at least not all. The Fremen leech the water out of Harkonnen corpses, only to comment that the chemicals in their blood continue to taint the water and make it unsuitable for consumption.

Remember there is no pee hole in those suits. Desert ppl be smelling 😂

as the nasa moto goes, today's coffee is tomorrow's coffee

They probably get a lot of the required energy to run the suit from heat and the sunlight. The only part that needs to come from your movement would be for pumping the water and coolant around.

The key is a heat pump. With enough engineering, I bet an intravenous system could be used to regulate body temperature. The body will produce a bit more blood to keep the pressure up. You’d have to keep the blood from freezing or clotting, but you could use a small compressor and heat exchanger to collect enough body heat to boil a wastewater reservoir. If you’re really clever you could run a Stirling engine off the water vapor to help it condense for drinking even faster, and help drive the compressor.

Clothing collects the moisture and Oils from your skin and we recycle it via Washing Machine and Water treatment Plants.

It captures sweat.

So we just have to wait for more micro tech

The energy for a Still suit comes from movement of the body... Did you not read the book?

I thought the basic idea was that the body in motion forced the sweat and urine through some form of water filtration system. Not quite distillation, as it would be keeping the moisture from being exposed to open air or extreme heat.

Thats with the idea that its all done from a backpack. Who knows, these suits could be designed with small channels and reservoirs that create many places for water to evaporate from body heat or the sureounding temperate, and could have channels and reservoirs meant to cool down the gasses and collect them for consumption. Its my personal belief that people limit their imagination to current tech and dont ever try to think of other ways in which something may be possible in the future

Its funny what he described is more like the less efficient bulky Harkonnen suits. The Fremen are 20,000 years in the future and have been perfecting desert survival for many generations...so you can't exactly grasp how well they do it.

as other comments have stated, the stillsuits recycle not distill water. Although seeing as they live in a desert with temperatures of like 140 F, just at a quick glance i think it wouldn’t be too far fetched.

We need stillsuits for Texas summers

Sweat does not cool you unless it is evaporating. The phase change itself is energy intensive, this is what comprises the bulk of the energy used by a typical distillation column. The point of the suit is to use your body heat to evaporate the water in your sweat (something that normally can't be done when your skin is covered) to then cool you down and provided drinking water.

Take out the oxygen carry factor from the space suit and how much would you need size wise to purely focus water?

Just a reminder, Dune is set in the year 10191 After Guild. The Spacing Guild is first established some time in the 13th millennium AD/CE(12000-12999). Our present day reality of 2024 is the 3rd millennium AD/CE. Just because it can't be made today, doesn't mean we won't figure it out in the intervening 20000 years.

I think the actual tech wouldn't involve boiling or centrifuge, more likely fluidic nanomaterial tubes that just attract the water molecules inside while repelling the impurities.

Catching the sweat would negate the cooling effect of sweat. So you would need a lot of energy to cool you.

It may be bulkier now, but in the far future they may have micro-tech that can easily do the same thing, even imbedded in fabric...

Possibly use a dehumidifier to extract the water from our own sweat similar to how atmospheric water generators work

Actually I’m perfectly willing to believe stillsuits would be more efficient and slimmer 8 thousand years from now than right now

HEY!! My girlfriends dad works for ECLSS at NASA that does the water filtering stuffs and you can sometimes donate your pee if you’re there on the right day

I think one really important factor is that, the still suits from dune probably evenly distribute the water through your entire body.

Stilgar gets his name from wearing a stilsuit

"space suits use water to cool you down" There it is! God damn it! There it is. I can't tell you how much trouble I have to explain to people that space is NOT cold.

Huh. Ok so the system inside the space suit pumps cold water around to keep the astronaut cool, because of the heat from the sun etc. You wouldn't need an onboard system to heat the water in order to distill it, you would just need to run the older water near the surface of the suit and use that incoming heat to boil it and send it into a distillation system that would use the cool water (which is already there) to turn it back into condensation. You wouldn't need much extra space to do it, it doesn't need to travel far. And it doesn't need to boil and become a hazard just to evaporate. If you were to run a 'warm' water line near the exterior of the suit, paired up side-by-side with the cold water tubes, you would just need a vacuum sealed tube in the middle. A barrier between the warm water and the vacuum tube would be designed to only allow vapor to pass through it (micro perforations would prevent water from passing but allow steam). Once it's in this tube it would be close enough to the cold water to condensate, and get drawn out by the change in temperature back to the water tank where the water gets chilled. That means the water in the cold tubes is always fresh, as it would be able to use the heat of the sun & space to maintain the system. But the oxygen thing is beyond me.

There's an obvious difference between astronaut suits and ground suits. Space suits have to operate in a huge temperature range with limited.movement and 0g. There are semi permiable.membranes which allow water to enter but not exit. Pumping channels are possible. You can clear the biggest contaminant NH3 ammonia in urea using evaporation (similar to salt removal) or a compound like clinoptilolite. But a large portion of your body moisture is lost around the head. The other problem is sweating is designed to cool the body through evaporation. If you collect the water off the skin and not the vapor, that cooling process stops.

This some star wars/fallout level lore. I love this. Never watched dune but I might just cause of this

I'd contend that the water recycler unit on ISS is functionally closer to a stillsuit than a spacesuit is. The recycling function is what distinguishes a stillsuit from any other type of environmental suit, after all.

Theres gotta be some way to use the vacuum of space to boil the water, no extra energy needed cause it does that on its own.

I'm sure within the next 10000 years we might have miniaturized the technology enough to make those suits practical.

They get their name from a still. A method of gathering water in the desert.

The fact that we *can*, usually follows the pattern that we will find a way to make it more efficient, smaller and more easily available over time. Perhaps not before I’m 70+ yrs old, but over *some* time. 😅

Cooling suits are really cool, but sooooooo impractical for free-reign walking around. It's technically possible, but its usually better to be attached to a circulation system. Now, EVA suits solve this problem by being in a relatively zero-G environment, so weight isn't an issue. But, say, walking around in the Sahara? That gets heavy quickly. Most practical use heat suits for terra firma are connected to what is essentially an AC unit via tubing. You can actually see something similar in astronaut launch suits, especially back in the day. Those little "briefcases" you see the Apollo astronauts carrying is a temporary measure to get them from suit-up to the cockpit where the hoses will be swapped out for built-in units in the cockpit. Race car drivers in long-haul racing also often use them, and will usually have a built-in unit in either the passenger seat space or in the back of the car. Certain labratories and even some foundries use them, and will have hoses running a few yards to allow relative mobility. Cosplayers have even been known to rig up mildly efficient heat suits for their ovdrsized costumes, but their units are often not as good as what you would get from a larger, less mobile unit. For a military application like the Fremen using them in their war with the Harkonens, we are currently still quite a ways away from making that a reality. At the very least you'd need a strong power source to operate the whole thing for at least 12 hours at a time. The entire rig would likely be just as if not more dangerous to the end user in a combat scenario, where bullets, shrapnel, and other hazards could breach a battery or the gas lines.

The books never address how they keep the wearers cool. If the sweat can’t reach the outside air, the sweat will not evaporate and cool the person. This is the point of sweat. Like wearing spandex in the desert, it would only be a matter of time before you die from heat stroke.

I think the big problem would be cooling. They'd need extra high thermal conductivity fabrics or fans and heatsinks. If you wanted to carry tens of pounds of gear and swap with freshly charged batteries every 12 hours though you could do it with present day dehumidifiers I'm pretty sure

Just remember that the point of a stillsuit id to hold a LITTLE water. You're supposed to put the water it distills back into your body be drinking it. It only "holds" a few ounces.

Maybe next year

Could you use the vacuum of space to distill the water?

So what if the still suit was under a vacuum so the boiling point would be lower

I thought Stil Suits were named after their inventor Stilgar.

Where's the button that removes some parts of the still suit?

though space is cold, you overheat in a space suit. there is no air, so "radiating" body heat is more difficult

Well, give us another 8,000 years or so, and still suits should be a breeze!

Fremen fought Sardaukar while distilling water

Well just like data storage for a computer technology will eventually get small enough to be practical

The fact that you kept saying "water" but then changed to the "liquid" in toilets made it more ick.

Good thing we still have 8000 years to refine the process