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Laser Triggers Electrical Activity In Thunderstorm
esocid writes "A team of European scientists has deliberately triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds for the first time by aiming high-power pulses of laser light into a thunderstorm. At the top of South Baldy Peak in New Mexico during two passing thunderstorms, the researchers used laser pulses to create plasma filaments that could conduct electricity. No air-to-ground lightning was triggered because the filaments were too short-lived, but the laser pulses generated discharges in the thunderclouds themselves up to several meters long. Triggering lightning strikes is an important tool for basic and applied research because it enables researchers to study the mechanisms underlying lightning strikes. Moreover, triggered lightning strikes will allow engineers to evaluate and test the lightning-sensitivity of airplanes and critical infrastructure such as power lines. Research into laser-triggered lightning has been going on for some years. Until now, no experiment was able to produce a long enough plasma channel to affect the electrical activity inside clouds."
...to welcome our lightning commanding overlords!
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If the cost of the lasers and the energy for them didn't cost to much, it may be a possibility in the future to create energy using lightning strikes. Due to the infrequency of lightning, no one has ever made a great effort to try this. If the technology is cheap enough, this would be a great test and possibly a future energy source.
Please visit http://www.mederbil.com/ i7, GTX 275, 4 1TB Caviar Green in RAID 0+1 array, EVGA X58 3X SLI Board, Silver
Seriously.
...to shooting a laser at a big storm cloud trying to generate lightning. None whatsoever.
All's true that is mistrusted
A research site in Florida fires rockets trailing a wire into thunderstorms to stimulate lightning strikes: http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/rocket_lightning_030130.html Video on this page: http://skydiary.com/gallery/chase2002/2002lightmovie.html
OK, you may need more electricity to drive the laser than one can get from a discharge, but how about harvesting the clouds?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Just be sure you surround the laser with some sort of Faraday cage...we'd hate to see your experiment succeed...only to lose your expensive high-power laser to a lightning strike... ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
As cool as that would be, I'd rather have Mjolnir and use that to control the storms...
Just a thought...
Though I didnt write this list (I DO have more of a life than that!), I thought it cool...
http://www.aibuiltpc.com/THOR_and_Mjolnir.html
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Just go fly a kite... and don't forget your keys!
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Sometimes I think these discoveries aren't the result of due scientific process. Sometimes I think a bunch of researchers were sitting around a break room table and said, "Let's shoot lasers at clouds!" Shooting anything with a laser to see what happens is a noble scientific endeavor.
I think the burden of proof is on the scientist. How do we know that God wasn't bowling during the precise time in which the laser was used? - Dude from Growing Pains.
It works! It works! It works!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...make a lower resistance path between cloud and ground...
Either with a wire on a rocket or a lower density column of heated air...
So, that lowers the threshold of charge differential required for the discharge.
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
After reading this article, and doing a little research, I discovered some facts proving that with a little hard work and a little development, they may be able to reverse engineer technology like this to extract energy from storms. This would be useful for to stop lightning from hitting major cities. Some places uses planes to drop a gas into storm clouds to stop storms, it is very risky, but also makes tornadoes a little more mild, believe it or not.
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How did they get the sharks with the friggin' laser beams into the clouds?
today is spelling optional day.
a new tool for America's War on Drugs!
Yeah, I don't listen to me either.
There are simpler ways. Ben Franklin used a kite to good effect. Long metal poles in the middle of a field also work.
Just don't cross the beams.
This makes me think of the storm generator in Red Alert 2. If could something even remotely like that working...
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
Why hasn't this been tagged whatcouldpossiblygowrong yet?
Don't forget supervilliany.
Sounds like there could be a Darwin Award in this.
Better hope this technology doesn't make its way to Redmond, if it does we will have a lot more than flying chairs to worry about...
I'm still waiting for the television broadcast on every channel to say the mad scientist is holding the world hostage.
. . .means. "Reverse Engineering", I think is not the right term here. I think "applications" might be a better term, possibly. That is, you can possibly apply the scientific principle that has been discovered in this experiment to technologies such as you describe - e.g. using it to shield cities/property from damage.
The problem is not lack of( lightening strikes all over the planet every minute). The problem is getting it to hit in the same place over and over as well as being able to handle the amount of power that comes with it. If this can be used in areas that get lots of strikes, it may be possible to direct them to a collection spot. Btw, some good spots for collections would be mountain tops. Here in colorado, being on top a 14er in the mid-afternoon can be challenging. We actualy get a lot of fried texans and Californians each year (caused by an inability to understand that when you are above tree-line, you are the most electrically conductive item there).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A bunch of basement dwellers will rush outside with their mini laser lights to either get zapped by lightning or busted by the police for being terrorists when a plane flies overhead. Their sacrifices for science will be greatly appreciated by the community.
First 'Run Google App Engine Apps On Amazon's Cloud'.
Now European scientists are shooting the sky with their laser producing long enough plasma channel to affect the electrical activity inside clouds.
DOS attacks ?
I remember watching a video about a guy who shot homemade rockets, trainling a long thin wire, into thunderclouds. Pretty cool.
Apparently, the exhaust and the wire both triggered lightning strikes that traveled down the wire and/or exhaust plume to the ground.
Pretty neat.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
This could go a long way towards allowing us to harness the power of lightning! We could build lightning farms in areas where lightning often forms, and find a way to store the power.
It looks like Destro has finally succeeded in getting the Weather Dominator online...
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Attention UN Security Council, this is Cobra Commander! Acquiesce to my demands or face the wrath of Cobra's lightning laser device!
It's part of one of Baldrick's cunning plans. Clouds are made of water, right? And sharks swim in water. So if you kitted up the sharks with lasers...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If I'm not mistaken that mountain is in the Philmont Scout Reservation. Surely there must be other slashdotters that have climbed it. Yes?
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Most people don't realise that electrical storms cost "billions" of dollars to electrical suppliers with (nuclear) plants going of line to transformers being damaged or destroyed. The first I heard about this type of research of using lasers to redirect and control electrical discharge was in the early 90's (in Japan). If you want big $$$ funding and you like big $$$ lasers this is a great research area for that.
They still need sharks, just to be on the safe side.
It probably won't be quite the same as regular lightning. Until they get some evidence that the triggered lightning packs as much oomph as the real deal, I'm skeptical.
...I'm the only one!
Wait, let me read that headline again...
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
At last, Pinky, my plan to take over the world is complete. Surely no one will be able to stop our storm controlling lasers now....
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iJPFSNu_QNs
were they able to generate 1.21 jiggawatts?
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
Sooooo.... Can you fire a laser, capture the ensuing lightning, use that energy to re-power the laser (with some energy to spare), repeat?
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
Negative... positive... it's all just signs.
Look, at this time, there is little chance of CAPTURING ALL of the energy with today's technology (from what little I know). But providing a break water is very different mater. We have the ability to handle all the energy, just not the storage. So, we simply run it into resisters, and lose some of the energy as heat. Heck with recent idea of a new thermoelectric generator, it might be possible to not have to just dump all the energy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1. Set up giant skyward-pointing laser.
2. Connect to mad-scientist-style lightning rod.
3. Wait for thunderstorm.
4. Profit!!!
We use the lightning to drive the laser, and syphon off the excess energy into big batteries. The process is self-sustaining until the storm runs out of juice, when it ends naturally. Free electricity for us and no lightning damage to the surrounding area 'cause we're sucking down all the bolts ourselves. It's win-win!
(of course, now all the America-hating greenies will come out of the woodwork, claiming that we're exploiting the world's natural lightning resources, and warning of grave consequences once we reach "peak storm" or other such nonsense)
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
I remember in the 80's seeing a TV show on directions in space-based weapons research for the SDI/Star Wars program. While both lasers and particle beam weapons were considered, each had their drawbacks. Lasers were subject to attenuation from clouds and atmospheric dust, whereas particle beam weapons were subject to bending from the Earth's magnetic field, as well as dispersion from electrostatic repulsion of the ions. One suggested possible approach was to use a (relatively) lower-power laser to ionize a plasma channel as a conduit for the ionized particle beam (although I expect that would only be effective in atmosphere and therefore would require a lot of LEO satellites). So laser-seeded lightning isn't a huge stretch in that direction - a bigger question would be why hasn't anybody tried it before?
But this article got me thinking about politicians and religious fundamentalists who lie through their teeth while exclaiming "If I'm lying, may God strike me down with lightning/where I stand". A set of geosync laser platforms powerful enough to create an ionized channel between storm clouds and people who have uttered that phrase just seems long overdue.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Scientist: Hmm... I wonder if it does that every time?
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
...banned http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/04/australia_may_o.html
...welcome our new lightning controlling sharks with frickin' laserbeams attached to their heads overlords.
I was thinking that a more indirect method for collecting the energy would be easier. If you caused an air-ground strike, why not try collecting energy from the induced magnetic field. I would assume the lightning strike is very close to the ground based laser. The collection system would be setup around that point. I know the field would not long (but without a moving coil, the changing field is required to in induce current in the collection coils) nor would it be an efficient method (not really sure how bad). But it has the advantage that a majority of the system would never come in direct contact with the lighting strike.
so who will do it first?
An OCD child drawing a peace-sign?
I wonder if a satellite holding a powerful enough laser would able to be able to direct lightning down towards a specific target on earth. It's basically what they tried to do in Real Genius, but I guess the idea here would be the lightning would have to be more damaging than the laser.
This company's been doing this for a few years.
http://www.appliedenergetics.com
They don't wait for nature to come up with the high voltage though.
No known Baldrick would have known clouds are made of water.
After all, I am strangely colored.
The reason this hasn't been tried commercially is that there aren't commercial quantities of energy available. A bit of googling yields a figure of 250kWh per strike, or less than my personal energy bill for a quarter. It's a bit like shuffling your shoes on the floor to generate static electricity - most of the energy goes towards heating up your shoes, not transfering electrons.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
How long until we can mount them on sharks?
If it's on the head of a friggin shark!
As with many things being studied in academia there is already a company that does this. http://www.appliedenergetics.com/ Why wait for storm clouds?
Philmont Scout Ranch has called for a statewide freeze of all weather modification research over fears that Mt. Baldy --and the thousands of Boy Scouts who summit it annually-- could be next.
Unlimited power!!!!!
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
I wonder if this could be used as a form of advertising.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
It is ALIVE!!!!
Some scientists played too much Red Alert in college.
Posting with out proof reading since 2001.
Fricking lasers blasted at fricking high powered electrical storms that would fry your ass even on ordinary days? This should end well. :o
Queue the Back to the Future jokes :)
A silly question perhaps, but if the laser beam is creating the plasma channel to guide the lightning, isn't the lightning going to hit and damage the laser ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Just when you thought you heard it all...
Sharks with laser beams causing lightning strikes!!!
Would someone think of the sharks!!!
Having left the academic world for the commercial sector, the parties are the thing that I miss the most. The bean counters don't seem to have any concept of livening-up the office party by say, making lightening by shooting lasers at clouds. They think that we should be happy with traditional party games like photocopying our genitals. Where's the fun in that?
Of course, that was just a prototype. Wait till you see the "real thing" at the Who's come-back tour of the US (we don't need lasers to make thunderstorms in the UK).
If by lots, you mean 2 or 3, and if by "Texans and Californians", you mean mostly Colorado natives, then your statement is true.
Exaggerating minor points for a bad joke is pretty asinine.
"A team of European scientists has deliberately triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds"
As opposed to all those times they did it by mistake, eh?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Acutally, we get about 10 hits a year, with 2-3 deaths. We are one of the worse states for hits. In fact, given our size and population density, we are probably the worse state for lightening. Only Florida has more deaths (roughly double) and they have many time bigger population. We are 5 million and they are about 20 million. They should have about 3-4x our strikes.
And texans/californians account for about 20% of these. Now that does not sound like much, until you realize that a Coloradoans account for the majority of exposure. We probably account for about 90-95% of the exposure. Yet the texans/californians are hit as high as they are. It is disproportionate BECAUSE they are not thinking. They just assume that things are safe. After all, lightening is not a real issue in either of their states. It is because of this, that a number of CO emergency rooms are pushing that information on all of the information boards for tourists.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Somebody's a fan of pubic lawn care.
But your honor, I swear my neighbor looked just like a threatening cloud at the time!
As far as I'm concerned, the real "war" is the Global Struggle with Armed Fundamentalism. (Note: "ism", not "ists"---though if we're not careful we'll obviously screw up and eliminate the distinction.)
Imagine bringing to bear something that looks like classic Divine Intervention against them...unfortunately, technology can be used by people who are bright enough, regardless of whatever else they might believe, so you'd soon have the government of the Eternal and Universal Caliphate* using it to impress its subjects....
*That is, "Pashtunistan, for about twenty to seventy years." Neighbour to Beluchistan, Kashmir, and Greater Iran.
All hail our new Cobra Commander overlord! COBRA-LALALALALA!
I hear China is looking to add air to ground capability to this technology before August. They are planning to use it to light the Olympic torch.
The goatse guy fell and hit his head on the sink and woke up with this:
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'=o='
Time to upgrade my band's lighting / strobe rig ;-D
Music for coding. Genetic algorithm driven visuals. http://www
Wouldn't it be much cheaper to use the Ben Franklin approach - go fly a kite?
Of course not, lightning makes ozone, O3+.
Come to think of it, shoot lasers at those big thunderstorms in Australia and close up the ozone hole... power them with that giant tower thing they were talking about.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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