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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
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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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
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
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."