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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.
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: Music Factory.
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I hope they dont build those damned things anywhere near my house,
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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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This is a TERRIBLE source of renewable energy. Lightning is a pulsed power source, where our demands are essentially steady. Lightning is caused either by wind or solar wind (charged particles accumulating in the atmosphere), so why not pick that up directly? We have wind turbines and solar cells. These are far more sensible than lightning as a power source.
And for reference, wind power is effectively solar, since wind is cause by uneven absorption of solar radiation, which causes convection currents.
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.
Well, lets see:
Production of O3 that protects us from UV. I think that is a big one.
Starts forest fires every so often that restarts the growth cycles (which shows that nature has adopted to NEEDING lightening).
Miller/Urey's experiments showing that lightening's impact on various chemicals made a number of base molecules that life needed. I would say that suggests that many more molecules are produced by lightening than we realize, that are likely absorb by bacteria, plant, or some other bottom feeders.
And that was just a few positives from Lightening.
Now, as to hemlock, it has a number of interesting issues. A number of animals are somewhat immune to it, so with multiple feedings on it, they build up a quasi immunity to it. That means that other animals that enter the area and attempt to eat the plant will succumb to it. Interestingly, there is evidence that hemlock alkaloids build up in small quantities in herbivores such that if a predator kills and eats them, they die (think mercury in our ecosystem).
Point is, that nature has adopted and used hemlock.
What an idiot and asshole you are. Pretending to be somebody that knows something of science. You remind me of another troll (flyinwhitey, ifwm and a few other logins that that idiot had).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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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So what if it is pulsed? It is ALWAYS happening around the world. ALWAYS. And in large large large quantities per strike. 5 billion joules for a small strike. If it is possible to encourage a strike and to get it to hit a particular area, then this can be used in storage (thermal? Electrical?) or simply converts H2O to 2 H2 and O2. One normal storm can actually power all of USA for 20 minutes. And a storm in the midwest (very wicked strong storms) can power all of the USA for several hours. Keep in mind that just 60 years ago, if you told ppl that they could get direct electricity from the sun, few would believe you. More importantly, most would say that it was not useful. Finally, what is wind and solar, but pulsed energy as well. Just for longer durations. But you have ZERO control over these, where as, it is POSSIBLE to control lightening.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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
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 may wish to finish reading the linked article, they're still working on the funding. But if they get it, there will be tickets. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/648673855/the-lightning-foundry
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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.).
http://gizmodo.com/5830907/every-single-gadget-should-be-waterproof-like-the-motorola-defy%252B-android-phone
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Tesla didn't do that and that's why history is the way it is.
Nope. It has nothing to do with practicality as we know it. History is the way it is regarding Tesla due to Edison's obsession with money and fame. Tesla had the brilliant ideas and brilliant inventions... but no one could figure out how to regulate (i.e. charge for) wireless power. Tesla's inventions were superior to Edison's similar work, and Edison knew this... but Edison's wired power was simple to meter. This and this alone is why we use wired power... because no one could fathom having free, wireless electricity.
The Admin and the Engineer
Let's first try to fully understand the phenomenon, so we can be better prepared for it.
Then as a source of energy: well maybe, but going to be hard. A strike may carry a lot of energy, it's also short, and as such the energy density is huge. Hard to capture and store (and we're not exactly good at storing energy to begin with). And it's unreliable: you never know when and where the next one strikes.
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.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
Well, lets see:
Production of O3 that protects us from UV. I think that is a big one.
What an idiot and asshole you are. Pretending to be somebody that knows something of science. You remind me of another troll (flyinwhitey, ifwm and a few other logins that that idiot had).
This is not correct. O3 in the stratosphere is produced by UV-B splitting oxygen.
O3 produced by lightning never gets anywhere near the stratosphere. Mostly stuck on the surface where exposure can be harmful to humans.
Last time I checked we are ALL clueless idiots. Disparging others is like a bunch of retards arguing over who is the smarter retard.
Repeat the Philadelphia experiment! I still want to know what happened! - for real
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Lightning is actually an important source of nitrogen fixation for plants. Nitrogen oxides produced from lightning combine with atmospheric water produces nitrous and nitric acids, and when precipitated back into soil becomes a crucial nutrient source for plants worldwide.
The problem with DC was that the power plants could economically deliver DC electricity only to customers within about one and a half miles (about 2.4 km) from the generating station
Now Tesla's design was based on AC and thus it could be transformed, allowing for long distance transport. I don't know how wireless fitted into that, but I can assume the powerplants could be far from the actual transmitters.
note: nowadays the supply lines for extremely long distances are DC again because of induction losses, but it's usually converted to 500KV with step up converters of various designs they didn't have back then.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
There is no conspiracy, it was just a bad idea.
Hey, dipshit troll, it was Edison's DC lines that needed a power plant every 40 miles.
Also, let's not forget that of the over 1000 patents Tesla has been awarded, most of them... roughly 75%... are still classified secret. This is quite the nursery for conspiracy.
The Admin and the Engineer
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.
Actually, lightning occurs up in the stratosphere and above and does produce O3 up there as well.
As to the disparaging comments, based on the AC's style, I am pretty certain that it is the guy that I thought it was. I once googled him because he was so nasty and figured out that he had multiple logins here and on other sites (flyinwhitey/IFWM/several others). He was a real loser from IIRC NJ, but living in Florida on a base (either navy or af; I have forgotten which one). In one of his blogs, he was proudly boasting of taking his dog out for a walk and having it shit on a neighbor's yard because he hated the guy and knew that he was not home. Then he went on to rip all of these other ppl that he knew. He was a real winner. Finally, he would login under different ones to comment back to himself with attempted slightly different styles of comments to support himself via comments. But the guy was such a wicked individual, that he ran around disparaging all sorts of ppl for no reason, other than to put others down. Worse, it appeared that he was doing a number of slurs, which just grated on me. And there was no reason to report him, since he would just go around and create new logins which would mean that I would have to later figure out who he was again. As it was, because he always did AC along with several or more of his logins on the pages, I used the logins to know that he was posting and would then see the AC postings with his style.
So, sorry, but I think that the AC that wrote that was the same guy. Basically, the creep is back.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Thanx, I did not know about that one, however I guessed that there some chemical reactions. I pointed out to another person some of the other uses (O3, forest fires, and finally, urey/miller). The urey/miller suggests that lightning will create a number of useful compounds and here you show just that. I am guessing that there are others useful chemicals that are created and taken up via first level life.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Also, let's not forget that of the over 1000 patents Tesla has been awarded, most of them... roughly 75%... are still classified secret. This is quite the nursery for conspiracy.
The amount of crackpottery surrounding Tesla is roughly 75% of his actual accomplishments.
I would ask for a credible citation but I know the drill "classified" "secret" ... HAARP is watching U.
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.
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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