How to drink urine to survive

created by creases

(idea) by creases (3.8 hr) (print) ? (I like it!) 3 C!s Sat May 27 2000 at 17:05:59

Never drink urine -- it's chock full of poisons. That's why you squirt it out instead of taking it in. In theory, though, it's possible to drink urine to survive. This is definitely something I've never done, but if I had to do it, this is what I'd do.

What you'll need before you begin:
1. Big sheets of durable transparent soft plastic tarp.
2. Rocks, sand, and ground-up coal.
3. A tin can.
4. Fire.
5. A shovel or spade would also help. So would some string.

Now, here's how it works. You want to start before dawn or shortly after. First, dig a pit. You want it to be someplace where it will recieve sunlight throughout the day. You don't want this pit to be too deep, but at least it should be deeper than your tin can is tall. You also want the pit to be conical. Line it with fresh greenery if you want. When you're done digging, place the tin can at the bottom point of the pit.

Next, cover the pit with a big sheet of the transparent tarp. Hold it down with rocks or something (whatever it takes to keep the durn thing from blowing away or something). Next, place a small pebble in the middle of the tarp so that the tarp itself is itself a shallow cone, with its point hovering right above the tin can underneath.

Now, dig a small, shallow trench around the perimeter of the covered pit. Don't make it so wide that water (or water-like substances) put in the trough would flow into the pit. You actually want the trench to be a temporary recepticle, and the ground will soak up the contents. What you've just effectively created is a solar still.

Take some of the plastic and make a tube. Seal it so that none of that nourishing peepee will leak out the sides. You want there to be a big hole at the top, and a little hole at the bottom. Fill the tube with different layers of rocks, sand, and coal.

Finally (and it's about time!), relieve yourself in the tube, and hang the tube from a branch, so that anything that drips out of the tube from the small hole will fall into one of the narrow trenches you've dug. The urine will pass through the absorbant layers of grit, and some of the poison will stay in the tube after all the moisture has dripped out.

Next, wait about a day. As the soon-to-be-ex-urine drips into the trench, the ground absorbs it. The sun, though, is heating the air under the plastic tarp, and the vapour is rising to hit the plastic. Then, as it condenses, it will drip down the side of the tarp and into the tin can.

By nightfall, your tin can should have almost as much water in it as you leaked out in the first place. It's significantly cleaner, too, but if you want to be absolutely sure you can boil it. A good rule of thumb is to boil water for ten minutes -- if you're afraid of all of the water boiling away, put a plastic tarp-cone a few feet over the can as it boils, so that the boiled water drips back in. The boiling should destroy any bacteria or contaminants that might be left after distillation, which should be few anyway.

Obviously, I wouldn't suggest this if you could get fresher, cleaner water anywhere. Any of these steps can be adapted, though, to clean out water that might be only mildly contaminated -- boiling is the basic approach, and you can add steps backwards through the urine-process if you really don't trust the water.

Well, I hope this helps someone sometime. Nasty as it may be, consider how little work the Mariner did to clean his urine in Waterworld. Now that's nasty!

(idea) by sensei (6.6 y) (print) ? (I like it!) 1 C! Sat May 27 2000 at 17:15:44

Actually, some people consider urine to be a tasty and nutritous treat chock full of enzymes and such. Others urinate on their feet to control athlete's foot and other fungal invaders.

No kidding. Do a Web search.

(idea) by lj (6.6 mon) (print) ? (I like it!) 1 C! Tue Nov 13 2001 at 19:20:17

As any aquarium book will tell you, on its own, sand is a merely a mechanical filter - it will take out large (compared to a bacterium) particles, and make the water look clear.
It won't make it clean. There's still nastiness in there. Ammonia is not good for you. It's probably what kills the athlete's foot fungus.

However, sand is a nice place for the kind of bacteria that eat yucky urine by-products to live, and if you leave it long enough, and keep feeding them, they will eat away all the crap in short order. This is Biological Filtration. The chief process is

Ammonia --> Nitrites --> Nitrates --> Algae.

The other main method of filtering water, Chemical filtration, involves using chemicals like carbon to neutralise the waste, and chlorine or similar to sterilise it. It's the quickest method, but can't always be combined with biological filtration, as it kills or starves the bacteria. As Cletus the Foetus suggested, ground up ~~coal~~ or charcoal would do nicely.

So, in short, sand from the bottom of a river, good.
Sand from homebase, bad. Bits of ~~coal~~charcoal mixed in, even better.

As it turns out, coal may have all manner of impurities, including Mercury, Arsenic and Cadmium. Charcoal doesn't.

printable version
chaos

Urine is a medicinal, cleansing, and nourishing food	Finding a bathroom in New York City	How to beat the national debt	Waterworld
Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel	Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk	Advantages to the Mammalian Urinary System	Where's the VOTE! button?
Female ejaculation	Taking the piss	urine	Punky Brewster
Mike's Hard Lemonade	Please Kill Me	Drinking with a spoon	Athlete's foot
tarp	Nasty	Utah liquor laws	Mile High Club
Yossarian	Surviving a desert hike	Getting to know you nodes	Sigur R�s

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