In my experience the desert isn't particularly unsuitable for human occupation. Barren wasteland deserts of endless dunes from the movies like the Sahara are not the normal. Certainly not in the USA.
What I find is the desert tends to be relatively undesirable land so it's very affordable and abundant. This has the effect of selecting for poor residents who want land of their own but can't afford anything better than desert property, and often can't afford to install a well once they've bought the land. What usually happens is their water gets hauled either by themselves or by a commercial service from the nearest city water supply, it's mostly an inconvenience.
Having a system that can directly take atmospheric air and solar energy to produce drinking water on-site for substantially less cost than installing a well would be life-changing for many of these folks. At the very least it would improve their water security since relying on an automobile for your only source of potable water isn't exactly ideal. Presumably one doesn't even need a permit from the county to start extracting water from the air with a device the size of a microwave. This is a huge difference in barrier to entry, especially for the poor.
I'm guessing you have no desert experience based on your comment. I live in the Mojave and it's actually quite nice for most of the year. There's such an abundant aquifer near me that Cadiz, Inc. is embroiled in controversy over plans to bottle and sell its water. [0]
Here's some food for thought: It's often claimed that mosquitoes have killed more than half the people who have ever lived. Guess what isn't a problem in the desert? Mosquitoes. I recently visited northern MN and frankly find my desert land far more suitable to human occupation than that mosquito infested swamp.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-trump-cadiz-201704...
Either you figure out a way to get water, or you move to someplace where you can (perhaps another location in that same desert, but closer to a road that water trucks can navigate?) Such is the tyranny of our basic biological needs.
If this contraption works and is reliable it effectively turns all desert land into land w/potable water.
Why should we disregard this progress and what it enables?
If it works for you and you're paying for it, then more power to you. If it works and the rest of society is paying for it, subsidizing your lifestyle, then it becomes reasonable to figure out what the most efficient method of ensuring you have access to water is. If funding the installation of these devices is more efficient than relocating you, then great. However if relocating your community makes more ecological and economic sense, then you should either find a way to support yourself, or accept relocation.
I suspect, though, that you're not trying to grow your own food. If you were, you might find the desert to be less suitable to human occupation than Minnesota.
There are fewer pests to deal with in the desert in general. From what I've seen driving past area farms the main investment is canopies presumably to help retain a more humid environment and reduce the amount of sunlight.
As an individual I can easily have a little greenhouse outside, I certainly have enough space.
It's something I intend to do eventually, but it's pretty far down the priority list at this time.
Or are you part of the Cadiz Water company? If so, yes, you probably have enough water.
Ahem - Yuma. Where your salad probably came from (maybe with some food-borne illness thrown in, but that's another discussion)...
Oddly enough, I go to Cadiz (California) on vacation sometimes...
What do you do there for vacation? I wasn't aware there was anything out there other than some industry like the evaporative ponds on the wikipedia page...
And there's some kind of orchards, though they aren't very big.
I don't think there are any realistic outcomes to such a scenario that don't involve immense loss of life.
[1] Original link not working https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1rpmFi...
Consider Centralia PA. Was it reasonable for the government to buy out a community that could no longer reasonably exist due to local environmental factors, leaving a few stubborn people behind to fend for themselves? Yes. Because if you really want to live on top of a coal mine fire, that's on you. Relocating the community is more feasible than trying to salvage it.
Statement 2: I refuse to provide additional financial accommodations to people living in the "wrong" place compared to those living in the "right" place.
The two are very different statements. Statement 1 is much less defensible position than statement 2, even though even 2 can be problematic. You seemed to hold statement 1 as your position in the first comment and sort of acknowledged statement 2 in your second. Please don't espouse statement 1, is all I am saying.
That may have been your read of it, but that was not my intention. If somebody wants to stay behind, as some in Centralia did, that's their perogative. Society has an obligation to help people meet their basic requirements, but the form that assistance comes in is another matter. The assistance may very well be in the form of "we can't afford to support your lifestyle in that location, so we'll pay you to move."
If moon men figure out a way to pull water out of rocks, that's wonderful for them. But if they want me to give them water, I'll be glad to give them all they need as soon as they come back to earth. They're entitled to clean water, but not clean water on the moon.
How is this not defensible at all? It's perfectly reasonable. Let's go back to Centralia PA: how exactly do you propose the government make that town safe to live in when there's a coal fire underneath it which has been burning for 50 years? It that doesn't qualify as "the wrong place", I don't know what does. You can cry about moral problems all you want, but the laws of physics (which govern coal fires) really don't care about human morals and ethics.
Let's come up with an even more extreme example: NASA determines a space rock is going to strike your town (of ~10,000) next year and wipe it out. Let's assume that somehow their accuracy is excellent. There's nowhere near enough time to come up with a way of rerouting this killer asteroid (after all, we've never done that before and don't really have the technology), and luckily it's only big enough to wipe out your town, instead of causing planetary-level destruction. The government wants to relocate everyone to safety. Are you saying this is wrong somehow, and that the government should somehow make this town safe from asteroid impacts? That's truly insane.
But seriously, there comes a point when it's more efficient to build housing for people that is closer to sources of clean water. Whatever they are doing out there in the desert without water and infrastructure probably isn't very productive in the first place, and if they can't even do it sustainably, we should question what the point of it is. Not every environment is suitable for human occupation. How many billions of dollars would you spend shipping bottled water to the moon before you put your foot down and tell people to stop living there?