Bill Gates gives us clean drinking water

Dorothy and Patrick, my daughter and son-in-law, recently made me aware of an interesting, almost unbelievable humanitarian achievement backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Hundreds of thousands of people die each year, mainly in Third World countries in Africa and Asia, for lack of safe, clean drinking water.

But what these people always have plenty of is their own feces (human poop).

And who knew that feces has water?

How to get the water extracted from the feces and to make it clean and drinkable?

Scientists (again backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) have devised a process, at something called an Omniprocessor plant, that does the trick.

Notice the picture accompanying this blog post of Bill Gates drinking water made from human poop:

Gates says he'd drink the feces-derived water from the Omniprocessor every day. It's that clean and delicious.

After the water is taken from the solid waste, that dried out poop is used to power a process that purifies the water.

Think about the implications for travel into outer space. It will take humans months, maybe years, to travel to another planet. And now they might not have to worry about where they get their next drink of water.

Thank you, Bill and Melinda Gates!