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Huge Tesla Coils Will Recreate Natural Lightning
jjp9999 writes "In order to study the nature of lighting, the team at Lightning on Demand (LOD) plans to build two, ten-story-tall Tesla coils—the largest ever—that will blast arcs of lightning hundreds of feet in length. LOD founder Greg Leyh said the project aims to reveal details on the initiation process of natural lightning, an area that remains a mystery, since smaller generated arcs have more trouble breaking through the air. It is believed that 'laboratory-scale electric arcs start to gain lightning-like abilities once they grow past about 200ft in length,' according to the LOD website, and so the team hopes to build Tesla coils large enough to do this. According to Leyh, 'Understanding how lightning forms [and grows] is the first step towards being able to control where lightning strikes or being able to suppress it completely in certain areas.'"
I can't wait for the SyFy movie based on the 'true story' :)
http://transformativeworks.org/
No man will ever control lightningt, ever! Thats the privilege of a god.
Isn't this essentially a dupe of:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/11/17/1540235/working-on-man-made-lightning
Sounds like something out of c&c red alert
We all know what happened the last time one of Tesla's experiments got away from him.
I'm amazed at their ability to get funding for this. I think it is going to have more value in it's novelist than it's scientific merit. Maybe they will sell tickets to see the show.
"LOD founder Greg Leyh said the project aims to reveal details on the initiation process of natural lightning"
I guess geeks have to learn to initiate on something.
The has got to be the best job ever..."Built ten-story Tesla coils to re-create natural lightning arc over 200 feet in length"
Will they also play music on them?
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Greg is a great guy, giant tesla coils are cool, and I'd love to know more about lightning, but it seems like lots of properties of air (especially when it has water or other polarizable droplets/particles) are frequency dependent. So I'm not sure how that this is really going to act like the natural lightning that we're used to... Science? Ok, but not Natural Lightning Science.
Hopefully they're building this over a smallish castle + mad scientist lab with convenient skylights, along with the worlds largest knife switch
This can't be anywhere near civilization, as a Tesla coil can fry any electronics. It also can't be in some forest wilderness, as a Tesla coil can easily ignite trees. As they say, they're making something that's more and more lightning like, which is also more unsafe. So building a 10' Tesla coil is probably not the hard problem.... the hard problem is operating it Safely, and actually being able to take experimental observations.... because, this is all very dangerous.
And also, will the FCC allow them to operate it, once they've built it?
Considering spark gap transmitters have long been banned due to the spectrum-wide interference they cause; and the earliest such radio transmitters were tesla coils... and EMI in particular can be generated across the spectrum as well, resulting in disruptions to communications, with such a large tesla coil, and such a large arc, especially if they are attempting to use frequencies associated with wireless transmissions; I wonder what will the RFI fallout will be.
; and any horizontally long metallic structure can get induced currents and also become antennae for further RFI emissions. Yes, lightning does show up on the radio spectrum as well, but a powered up Tesla coil emits many arcs not spread out by time, a much bigger footprint than lightning....
I'm having horrible flashbacks to C&C: Red Alert.
I'm having horrible flashbacks to C&C: Red Alert.
I'm having horrible flashbacks to C&C: Music Factory.
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That is as stupid of an idea as Gates' idea of stopping hurricanes or wiping out mosquitoes. Lightening likely does a LOT of good since nature has grown up with it. Instead, we should be trying to figure out how to harness it. That is a good source of renewable energy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I hope they dont build those damned things anywhere near my house,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
and it's wrong. Tesla coils produce high frequency -i.e AC- discharges at very high voltage and very low current. Lightning, on the other hand is a DC or very low frequency phenomenon combining extremely high voltages with extremely high currents. The currents are so high that they instantaneously heat the air and produce a loud boom- you may have heard it before- it's called thunder.
If he really wanted to duplicate lightning he'd charge up some big capacitors to extremely high voltages and draw arcs between their terminals. THAT would be a better simulation of lightning than the output of any Tesla coil.
Major props to the guy for marketing his idea. It's been picked up by every news agency from here to Mumbai. I'm sure he'll get the funding he needs to go through with the project.
>Tesla Roadster
Seems like there's an extra "d" in there.
Anyway, maybe this will finally prove or disprove the conspiracy theories about Nicola Tesla's wireless power transmission system. Alternatively, at least tesla coils as in C&C become reality. A great replacement for landmines, now that the boo-hoo pacifists try to ban them.
The very first communications of human origin that alien civilizations might receive will come from Nikola Tesla's attempt to broadcast electrical power through the air a little over a century ago. Provided they have sensitive and directional enough receivers, and can somehow filter out the radio noise from the Sun, that would mean that any civilization within a little over a hundred light years might already be trying to respond to us.
A while back I asked on an astronomy newsgroup, how far away could a civilization with the level of technology that humanity presently has, detect our own radio signals?
The sorrowful answer was that it was only three light years, which is a light year short of the distance to our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, which is also not likely to have any planets that could harbor life. The SETI researcher who responded also said that our strongest radio transmitters are the Distant Early Warning radars that the United States uses to watch for an incoming nuclear attack from the Soviets. That implies that we are only "communicating" with aliens who are in a generally northward direction relative to the earth.
I then asked how SETI hoped to hear from any aliens at all. His answer was that we expect that more advanced civilizations would transmit far more powerful radio signals. That doesn't seem right to me, unless they are specifically trying to communicate with other civilizations, as I would expect more advanced technology to result in lower radio power, rather than more, both to conserve energy and to enable more devices to use the available spectrum.
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For the right number, several possible startups already exist. http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinkent/140341111/
Although, I'm sure some of them are not legal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Td--Hltuol
Or Good for You.. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=giant+tesla+coils+in+russia&oq=giant+tesla+coils+in+russia&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=18110l28969l0l29610l27l27l0l10l10l0l297l3564l0.8.9l17l0 Sorry if any of these links are down.. seem to have struck a nerve with someone!
Soviets had gigantic Tesla coils decades ago.
Search the web and you will easily find pictures.
Somehow, I don't think clouds have ten story tesla coils.
That's what aliens will say.
We've got to push the limits of our understanding of physics and imagine more advanced methods of communications. Ones that could be directed at distant solar systems and get around the speed of light restrictions on communications latency.
I'm thinking along the lines of wormholes (Einstein-Rosen bridges). Assume that advanced civilizations will have figured out all the problems involved with sending these things around the universe and popping them open in front of target civilizations. Given the energy requirements needed to open one big enough to step through, this probably isn't what they'll use. But what about a wormhole just big enough to send a series of photons through (think fiber optics). We find one end of such a wormhole floating by, we grab it and look at it with an opto sensor. If it looks like we've got intelligence on the other end, we're in business.
We don't need to solve the physics of how to open or send such a wormhole. Leave that up to the more advanced civilization. All we have to do is recognize the end that's floating by locally, grab it and examine it.
Have gnu, will travel.
you're correct that compression generally makes the data look random. but some compressed formats have highly nonrandom components. bzip2 is organized into blocks so that if one block is corrupted the remaining blocks can be reliably decompressed.
high quality encryption cannot appear completely random, because every arbitrarily long random sequence has arbitrarily long sequences of any arbitrary bit pattern. suppose you used a radioactive source to generate a binary one time pad, then xored your cleartext with it. you'll someday find out the hard way that you transmitted "attack at dawn" in cleartext because your one time pad contained a long string of zeroes!
thus we could detect encrypted signals by watching for signals that appear TOO random. there are many statistical tests for randomness. I expect some of them could distinguish an encrypted signal from pure noise.
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that's cities have fm radio but rural radio stations are generally the lower frequency am.
which tesla coils are driven by sixty hertz alternating current, they get their incredibly high voltage by preventing a large inductance from conducting. inductors are current source that will develop any voltage necessary to continue conducting. eventually there is a powerful but very short-lived arc that also generates a very high frequency radio signal.
that's also why you shouldn't mess with large inductors if you don't know what you're doing. when high energy electrons strike the inner orbital electrons of high atomic number electrons the photon that's emitted from the collission is an x-Ray. that can give you Th3 C4nc3r.
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Control Lightning? Really! Control fucking lightning?
I am about as liberal as you can get when it comes to funding science but this rates right up there with Paranormal Research.
We built a 4 foot tall one of these when I was in High School. We used window glass and sheet metal for the capacitor and two pennies for the spark gap and it created a wonderful halo of radiated electricity, lit all the florescent bulbs in the room and it was cool, but a 100' tall version? Just say no. We have just a few more important things to spend our money on eight about now.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I saw this in Command & Conquer. BTDT.
The Tesla coil was not designed to make any arcs or sparks at all. Sir Oliver Lodge was responsible for such things, not Tesla.
One of the neater things I've read about is how Lockheed Martin went back to Tesla's technology to make a communication system for miners:
Heres another link: Tapping Tesla to Save Trapped Miners
If Tesla was 100 years ahead of everyone else, that means we should be plugging our devices into the Aether ("The wheelwork of nature") soon.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Did anyone else misread the subject as natural lighting? (Even the summary, as quoted, has it wrong at the beginning.) I was picturing artificial daylight in communal areas, such as city parks. Or replacement of the incandescent lights at home. Giant electric arcs... very cool!
you'll come out the other side as a largely random sequence of random types of fundamental particles, mostly photons. trust me. while I only playvacsoftware engineer on the Internet, I really am a physicist.
you could through one though.
I spent quite a long time puzzling overbhowbto encode a signal so that any alien that was capable of detecting it would bevquite certainbwas transmitted by intelligent beings. just for our signal to be nonrandom would be insufficient, as there are many physical processes that generate powerful nonrandom signals. pulsars are quickly rotating, highly magnetic collapsedvstars, butvwere thought at first to be signals from alien civilizations.
you also need a way for your signal to stabbed out from the enormous radio noise of the sun.
transmit pulse sequences with the number of pulses being a prime number withba modest pause in between. pause in between each sequence then transmit the next larger prime number. repeat until you get to a very large prime then startbover again with two.
to overcome solar noise, use an interferometer. two antennas spaced far apart have the same resolution as a single antenna as wide as the distance between the two. if you control the relative phase of your antennas you can focus yourvtransmittedvsignal with the same resolution. the focussed signal would appear more powerful than the sun's signal because it diminishes with the square of the distance.
such antennas could be placed in solar orbit at the earths lagrange points, with solar or nuclear power. they could transmit in many different directions simultaneously by altering their phases.
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when I type a correctly spelled word replaces itbwith some completely unrelated word. when I really do misspell a word the ios doesn't correct it.
my single most common error is to type v or b instead of space, but autocorrect doesn't know howbto fix that.
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You have to get the right Igor...
http://www.popfi.com/wp-content/uploads/marty-feldman-igor.jpg
PS -- Marty Feldman for the win!
Holy shit, if I were a supervillain, that's exactly the sort of institute that I'd want to run. They probably say: "What happens in Siberia stays in Siberia, except for the bits that were accidentally atomized. Those are floating around somewhere in the upper atmosphere." Also, they probably say: "In Siberia, a couple of people can hear you scream, but nobody really gives a fuck."
Is anyone looking into harnessing lightning's electrical power? There are many tall structures that are hit by lightning regularly, and they're virtually all located among electricity-hungry populations. I'm no EE, and obviously you can't just wire a lightning rod to a battery array, but could you not cascade the power through first an array of a shitload of small capacitors (can charge/discharge fast and handle high current) wired in parallel, which then charges one or more arrays of larger capacitors (can retain high charge capacity), which then charge batteries? Even if you only get a percentage and let most of the electricity go to the ground, it's gotta be worth the investment I figure. It would be possible to make a mobile rig and go where the storms are too.
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Doesn't this make you think of the weapons the aliens (the "Prawns", what a great name) used in Distrcit 9? What a cool (and terrifying) weapon, caused the people to EXPLODE upon being shot at (presumably from the instant vaporization of all the water in their bodies).
Would this device cause the same thing to happen if it could be used at a weapon? I heard that some scientists had figured out how to direct lightning bolts using (relatively) low powered lasers to create an ionized pathway in the air. So using a laser with this could possibly make a "lightning gun", no? Even if this weapon was large and bulky I think the psychological effects would be huge if it were used in something like crowd control!
Is it true that District 9 was made on a very low budget. If so, the special effects were excellent, the aliens and other CG elements looked completely believable and well integrated (correct movement, lighting, shadows, etc.).
In the 1890s, Tesla experimented with the concept as a possible alternative to Marconi's wireless telegraph. But the device's relatively short range and high signal noise made it impractical for widespread use. Short range is not a problem in most mine situations, explains engineer David LeVan, who led the Lockheed Martin research team. The devices the group developed, called the MagneLink Magnetic Communication System, combine a refrigerator-size magnetic generator with a briefcase-size receiving antenna.
Brilliant yes, but note the shortcomings in both the range, S/N, and the size of both transmitters and receivers. To be truly successful one needs to go beyond the "ah ha" moments, and overcome the practical barrier as well. Tesla didn't do that and that's why history is the way it is.
http://gizmodo.com/5830907/every-single-gadget-should-be-waterproof-like-the-motorola-defy%252B-android-phone
Look for comments by and in reply to "prometeum"
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/cam2.html
With this you can super heat the ionosphere, control the cooling plasma, heat up earth's ambient temperatures, light up the night sky, change the high weather patterns, steer hurricanes, bounce it of the highest realms of the ionosphere, shred the magnetosphere, open earth up to the sun's naughty flares, create floods, how about some earthquakes? You can communicate way down under the oceans, search for submarines, search for underground industrial complexes and generally cook any one you want all the while sending messages to their brains as it operates at human biological frequencies telling us all how much we are going to enjoy the next really big thing.
Tah!
That's not entirely true. My late grandmother was held in a bona fide Siberian prison camp for a while. The other prisoners there can hear you, and probably do care some, but are generally powerless to do anything about it.
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I don't understand what they hope to figure out beyond what we've all known for a hundred years.
If you don't want to be zapped make sure your not charged or the best path to ground and you have nothing to worry about.
Repeat the Philadelphia experiment! I still want to know what happened! - for real
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Read 'Micro' before hitting the 'on' switch ... ;-)
Will it include a cyclotron to make the high energy particles that are theorised to create the original conductive path wich allows the real lightning to travel far further than it should? The high energy particles may not be the reason, but this setup may be part of what's required to test it.
14 million volts should only jump up to 50 meters (or about 150 feet) or so, depending on the shape of the electrodes (33 KV/cm is a rule of thumb for perfect spherical electrodes, usually it's lower). No where near the hundreds of meters needed to cross air-ground.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
What the article fails to mention is what exactly the difference is between the arcs created by (smaller) tesla coils now and natural lightning. Is it that natural lightning needs lower voltage to travel longer distances through air than teslas? This would explain, why they need to built giant tesla coils in the first place.
Well, that's Tesla my dear brothers and sisters, what else to say other than that. How many other technologies were "accidentally forgotten" by the leading New World Order. Not to mention that all of Tesla's legacy is so great that one lifetime is simply to small for a total and complete understanding.
Greetings from Serbia:)
This gives a whole new meaning to Diablo 2: LOD. Shit, I'd be scared of that shit.
WTF Slashdot, why do I have to login 50 times to post?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You're allowed to proofread your prose before clicking that submit button, y'know.
Uhm.. a Vandergraaf Generator generates a static charge. A Tesla Coil is used to produce AC voltages my Tesla Coil has a 3" coil and a resonate frequency of 4300hz. This is far from lightning. Lightning is a static discharge. Check out the large Vandergraaf Generator at the Boston Museum of science. That is what you will need. A Tesla Coil is a completely different animal.
Par for the course. There are outstanding arguments about how the environment currently works (global warming vs sun spots, weather in Colorado that defies prediction) and a group of scientists want to learn enough about lightning to prevent it from happening. About 20 years after that happens they will probably have to study why bees are no longer pollinating. They should spend their time trying to power a flux capacitor instead.
I do that so I can verify that my iOS App runs properly on old firmware releases.
Yes, it is a huge PITA, but I don't want to require that my users upgrade their firmware.
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Wired.com also did a video on Greg and the Lightning Foundry
http://www.wired.com/video/latest-videos/latest/1815816633/diy-tesla-coils-will-shoot-260foot-lightning-bolt/1303110457001