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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/
Isn't this essentially a dupe of:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/11/17/1540235/working-on-man-made-lightning
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....
Don't worry, I spoke to the invisible pink unicorn (blessed be her holy hooves) and she is fine with it.
The One true One. Her Horniness. She whose hooves many never be shod. Her Pinkness.
I'm having horrible flashbacks to C&C: Red Alert.
I'm having horrible flashbacks to C&C: Music Factory.
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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.
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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Tesla's bad assery far exceeds the Tunguska myth. He figured out how to turn our great big ball of iron surrounded by an electrostatic atmosphere into a giant fucking power source. He knew burning fossil fuels was a bad idea 100 years ago before anyone ever conceived it would be an issue.
He was trying to hand us a solution to problems we didn't even have yet and give us technology not unlike the telecommunications we have today 100 years ago! He even told us how to fucking do it when he filed a patent on the process.
But hey, maybe these guys are on to his work and just needed a cover story to get funding for their own Wardenclyffe tower. One can only hope...
I have a book that is comprised of transcripts from lawsuits that Tesla was involved in where he used the court proceedings to document some of his tech. He was dealing with some very powerful industrialists, people who basically owned the world as everyone knew it. I have seen documentaries where it is demonstrated that Edison was worshiped by Presidents and important people the world over where Tesla isn't even mentioned--even in passing. When I first learned of Tesla I realized that I never questioned a lot of the things I take for granted and it wasn't well known who invented or developed them, now I know.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
You're just thor. Thtupid thod.
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.
Tesla was the man. He pioneered everything from physics to telecommunications. Though never realized, he actually figured out how to extract static electricity from the air and turn it into a power source. Talk about renewable energy.... Then there is the tesla turbine? You tube it. Its the sickest little mechanical device and so freaking simple its ridiculous.
I read the other day that scientists every now and again come across a new invention only to find out tesla patented the same thing 100 years prior.
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.
While I see your point, if you have a truly random entropy source, ANY xored combination of cleartext and cyphertext could (incorrectly) appear to form any arbitrary message in the encrypted message.
grep "attack at dawn" /dev/random (and wait a while. Probably a LONG while.)
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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."
That's a nice thought, except he didn't have a way to turn our great big ball of iron into an unlimited free power source. Just the thought is ridiculous. Tesla was obviously a genius, but he made claims for ideas of his that were never realized or were frankly impossible, or claims of amazing discoveries that he then never published. If he did have a method to develop free energy 100 years ago, not publicly divulging the information would have been strange given his financial difficulties as well as just of course he would have.
Every single person one hundred years ago could tell you that an unlimited free source of energy would have been better than oil. It isn't even really a choice, it's not a matter of Tesla having amazing foresight or being ahead of his time or what have you.
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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.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.