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!