[HN Gopher] Scientists Guide Lightning Bolts with Lasers for the...
___________________________________________________________________
Scientists Guide Lightning Bolts with Lasers for the First Time
Author : neom
Score : 32 points
Date : 2023-06-07 20:07 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| sfink wrote:
| Apparently you can ionize water with a laser. In theory you could
| float something on the surface of the ocean with an upward laser
| to collect lightning and a downward laser to direct it to, oh,
| undersea cables or submarines or whatever. Then you'd just need
| to miniaturize it all enough to be mounted on a shark...
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| On the small scale, adding an additional laser and an electricity
| source turns this into a wireless taser.
| htag wrote:
| A few questions come to mind:
|
| 1. Does the protection extend to allowing airplanes to
| takeoff/land during a storm?
|
| 2. Can this be weaponized?
|
| 3. Can this protect forests from lightning initiated forest
| fires?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Can this be weaponized?
|
| I expect the only limit here is human imagination. E.g., Hitler
| weaponized a microphone.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| I hope this means we can improve our study of lightening, it's a
| very exotic phenomenon. When you're first starting out studying
| plasma physics, you make some assumptions that make it easier to
| work the math, things like EM fields matter more than collisions
| do, it's generally low density, it's cold, it's relatively steady
| state. None of these things apply to lightening, an even so
| energetic and intense it makes antimatter[0] in our very own
| atmosphere. Obviously we've been able to study it, but if we can
| aim it we can use much more focused, higher resolution
| instruments.
|
| [0]https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
| nasa/2011/1...
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| The Langmuir Laboratory uses small rockets trailing wires to
| induce lightning for easier observation. It's a really
| fascinating process to see... a laser solution would be easier
| but I suspect the capital cost would take a long time to break
| even with the rockets.
| dragontamer wrote:
| If I remember my physics classes correctly, this is a
| surprisingly easy phenomenon to understand.
|
| 1. Lasers heat things up. In this case, they're heating up air.
|
| 2. Hot air has lower-resistance than cool air. This is why
| lightning happens at all: as lightning goes through its path, it
| heats up the air hotter-and-hotter, which allows for more and
| more electricity to flow. That is, lightning itself heats up the
| air which makes the lightning more powerful.
|
| 3. This article talks about a device that uses lasers to heat up
| air ahead-of-time, where you heat up the air along pre-designated
| "safe" paths to provide a virtual lightning rod composed of this
| narrow stream of hot air... rather than a metal rod.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| Seems powerful. Can we cloud seed, collect static electricity
| then harvest it for energy?
| htag wrote:
| No, there isn't enough lightning. Global lightning output is
| around 1% (or less) of global energy consumption. There is
| nothing about the technology that unlocks lightning bolt
| harvesting as a new feasible power source. We could do really
| similar things with simple lightning rods that have been around
| for centuries.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm curious if there are any unappreciated benefits of
| _uncontrolled_ lightning.
|
| (I can'think of any, but doesn't doesn't mean much.)
| goda90 wrote:
| Nitrogen fixation maybe? Lightning breaks N2 so it bonds with
| O2 into NO2. Rain then brings it to the soil to be taken up
| by plants. But lightning does this at a much smaller scale
| than microorganisms do, so maybe not too important.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I think many people over-estimate how much energy exists in a
| bolt of lightning. They're incredibly _powerful_ because they
| transfer the energy in a millisecond or less, but there are
| only about a billion joules in an average lightning strike. For
| reference, that means you would need to get your home lightning
| collector struck by lightning at least once a week in order to
| satisfy your home energy needs.
|
| https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/05/could-we-harne...
|
| Also, an important component in lightning is an upward
| convective current bringing warm and cooler air together, which
| cloud seeding would not affect. Clouds or rainclouds themselves
| don't cause lightning, which is why not all clouds/raincloud
| types are associated with lightning.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| Applied Energetics tried to sell a weaponized electrolaser as a
| sort of medium-range taser, right around 1st Fallujah, when
| things were really going into the thunder pot with great brown
| velocity[1]. I don't think they really had a working product in
| terms of "thing you can predictably make and which works most of
| the time". The idea itself is extremely compelling as a Less Than
| Lethal technology, though, and I'm always sort of curious why it
| hasn't been re-approached with newer laser tech.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser
|
| [1] The whole Iraq adventure was a pointless slurry, but I
| remember 2004 was when even the Rah Rah people finally quieted
| the hell down. It seemed like that was when every military unit
| in theatre was panic buying whatever wacky technology they could
| find.
| ftxbro wrote:
| > "Iraq adventure was a pointless slurry"
|
| I wonder where 'pointless slurry' is meant on the scale of
| justifications or rationalizations of war? Maybe more favorably
| than 'quagmire' but less than 'good shoot'?
| generalizations wrote:
| I imagine they discovered that a laser powerful enough to
| create a plasma channel was also powerful enough to burn the
| person it was pointed at.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Is there anything you can't do with lasers? I mean really!
| bob1029 wrote:
| I wonder if you could use some sort of multi-laser / DLP-style
| system to rapidly focus+scan+heat the vertical space above the
| target.
|
| The axial design clearly has a disadvantage with needing to be
| near the action on one side or the other.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-07 23:00 UTC)