[HN Gopher] DARPA program sets distance record for power beaming
___________________________________________________________________
DARPA program sets distance record for power beaming
Author : gnabgib
Score : 139 points
Date : 2025-06-15 22:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.darpa.mil)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.darpa.mil)
| janalsncm wrote:
| Could this also be a viable alternative to HVDC lines for
| civilian applications?
| theamk wrote:
| No. 800 watts (vs megawatts for HVDC). 5 miles vs thousands of
| miles. 20% efficiency optical to electrical - so electrical vs
| electrical is much worse - vs 90%+.
|
| This is so much worse in every aspect it's not really
| compareable.
| naruhodo wrote:
| It's great if you hate birds, though.
| other_herbert wrote:
| The key thing they aren't saying is how much power it took to
| "send" 800 watts 5.3 miles...
| bracketfocus wrote:
| They mentioned that it was 20% efficient at a closer
| distance.
|
| So likely much lower than that.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Wow that's a long way from the proposals for sending GW of
| microwave power from satellites.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Laser power beaming from space could be useful at lower
| power levels than that, for example for powering
| aircraft.
| conradev wrote:
| But pretty close to powering drones from ground stations
| aurizon wrote:
| Those sat to ground power sources use gallium arsenide
| switched FETs = synchronous rectification, avoiding the
| voltage drop of diodes has been tested on a small scale,
| the 10GW orbital 35% efficient solar arrays, maybe next
| week... Solar boilers, end to end, are more efficient
| than solar cells, but mechanical complexity(leaks,
| corrosion, worker avarice) made one US plan in the South
| West non viable. As we sit silicon-perovskite tandem
| solar cells will top out around 42-45% - unless Schockley
| is end runned? Ternary -??. A good lecture = https://www.
| youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0VJX0_Td0&t=2s&ab_channel=...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Solar thermal as well as solar-chemical systems have the
| problem of start-up.
|
| PVs do not have any problem starting up, they produce
| less than full power with less than full illumination but
| they produce something and once the illumination is full
| they produce full power immediately.
|
| Many solar thermal power plants are fired with natural
| gas in the morning to get them spun up to the point where
| they can take advantage of the solar energy. Without that
| they'd probably lose a few hours of production.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 20% efficiency in terms of light -> electricity. A 50%
| laser efficiency (electricity -> light) is really good,
| possible for some diode lasers, if you pump a fiber laser
| with diodes to get a high quality beam for cutting
| materials or weapons purposes maybe you get 25%.
|
| That demo would require about 45 kW of laser power with
| good beam quality which would be totally possible with a
| fiber laser
|
| https://www.rp-photonics.com/wall_plug_efficiency.html
| HenryBemis wrote:
| I was thinking of"how much is enough" so they can power
| 'instruments'. I am also thinking of 'how can we use this
| tech to revive space-instruments (the next generation of
| 'Voyagers' may be equipped with such receivers?)
|
| I also wonder how difficult/impossible would it be, and the
| 'throughput'. Assuming that you want to recharge a recon
| drone (or the 'next generation of Voyagers flying in space)
| that flies over XYZ area/country/etc. Would it take 1sec or
| 10seconds 'of beam', and the accuracy/waste/total amount one
| would have to 'dispense' in order to give that drone the X
| seconds of 'juice' to keep it running for 1000x X seconds of
| flight duration. And what about
| clouds/mist/rain/snow/birds/etc.
|
| 'Infinite energy' for a drone (I mean no dependency to come
| down to refuel) is a game changer.
|
| Would that work with 'instruments buried underground? And at
| what depth? ('War of the worlds' scenario). Could someone
| bury a device, with only the receiver protruding from the
| ground, with a battery to keep it alive, and waiting to be
| activated by a satellite passing by giving it the "10 seconds
| beam" to fully charge it and.. (I am thinking of the recent
| drone-related incidents/attacks within Russia and Iran)(if
| you park a drone for 10 months, its battery will deplete,
| right?)(I don't have a drone, but batteries are batteries).
|
| A second thought on the matter, can one 'program' the light
| to be also transferring data? Park the drones in <insert
| foreign territory>. No programming. In the middle of nowhere
| (no 4G-5G). You fly a satellite over it, beam down the
| 'juice' (together with the instructions - no interception of
| the transfer is possible). Someone finds it 'before', they
| only get the hardware but no info/intel.
|
| "The possibilities are endless" (and so are the nightmares)
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| This can only be used where efficiency doesn't matter, like
| military applications for powering a drone. The overall
| efficiency i.e. grid -> laser -> pv -> grid would be atrocious.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| The application to drones seems most clear: beam drones some
| extra power as needed. Or continually!
|
| I wonder how big that receiving apparatus is. Whether the
| receiver is gimballed, or whether the drone itself has to fly a
| heading to aim at the sender: TBD.
| larodi wrote:
| And have a great opportunity to drill some holes in birds
| heads.
|
| Sorry I really fail to recognise how beaming 1kw of excited
| particles is a safe thing to do just like this...
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| It must not be safe to be out in the sun then.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Last time I forgot sunscreen at a UV index of 10 my skin
| started peeling of after half an hour so...
| ben_w wrote:
| Density (and wavelength), rather than total power, is
| important.
|
| Sun's 1kW/m^2, and even then you shouldn't look directly at
| it, and being out in it all day without protection leads to
| sunburn.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It's not, for an extended period of time. Now imagine it
| was collimated rather than diffuse.
| kurble wrote:
| That's the thing, sunlight _is_ collimated. It only gets
| diffuse once it reflects of a diffuse surface.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Fair enough, poor choice of words on my part. What I
| meant was concentrated further (in terms of energy per
| area) than the typical concentration received at the
| surface of the Earth.
| vikramkr wrote:
| So there's this thing called sunburn...
| fleischhauf wrote:
| if you are the military and you are using drones to win a
| war, I don't think birds are your primary concern tho
| cap11235 wrote:
| That's basically an ad that appears to defense companies.
| Raytheon engineers love going "pew pew motherfucker".
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Hand egg enthusiasts also love...
| larodi wrote:
| sure in that case everything goes, and is curious why has
| it not yet been done with... drones routing the laser or
| repeaters reinforcing it with every loop.
|
| i can't recall a scifi story promoting such system either.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| How about drones with a solar panel case? Would require a sunny
| day to work at all though.
|
| Tiny nuclear reactor?
| ben_w wrote:
| On the scale that useful nuclear reactors operate, a "tiny
| nuclear reactor" is the size of a shipping container.
|
| Even a tiny _RTG_ is in the same range as a dumbbell.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| While not reactors, how about nuclear batteries without
| heavy shielding?
| ben_w wrote:
| Nuclear batteries are a superset of RTGs.
|
| There are other kinds of nuclear battery, but the ones
| I've heard of outside labs, are extremely low power
| betavoltaics.
| cap11235 wrote:
| The biggest issue for weight is that you are using trans-
| uranic materials. By their fundamental nature, they are
| heavy as fuck.
| ben_w wrote:
| Nope.
|
| Betavolatics can be just about anything that emits an
| electron. Could be tritium. Low power due to long half
| life and low decay energy, but not because it is low-Z.
|
| RTGs can be anything that gets hot from its own
| radiation. Loads of things with a short half-life and
| high decay energy, so phosphorus-32 would be a low-Z
| option, and polonium-210 (which still isn't transuranic)
| if you're completely disregarding safety.
|
| Big part of the mass budget is shielding, not source.
| This gets proportionally worse for small sources, as you
| need a certain thickness (proportional to r^2), while the
| emitter power is proportional to volume (r^3).
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| Why not just beam power down the optical fiber? Optical fiber
| is exceptionally clear and works in fog and rain
| malfist wrote:
| Fiber transmits light, not rf. To get power out of fiber
| optics you have to have a photovoltaic cell on the other side
| and there's a limit for how much those can produce with such
| a collaminated light source.
|
| Using fiber optics for power is like trying to make a solar
| panel generate electricity from a laser beam.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| just have a tiny steam turbine equivalent...? (some
| thermoelectric generator) You don't really need to be
| efficient. You have fans to blow air and dissipate heat on
| the other end after all
| 0_____0 wrote:
| You should do the first round of engineering calculations
| on this.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Using fiber optics for power is like trying to make a
| solar panel generate electricity from a laser beam._
|
| Isn't that exactly what power beaming is, except typically
| with frequency range in microwaves instead of visible
| light?
| malfist wrote:
| > except typically with frequency range in microwaves
| instead of visible light
|
| That's a big freaking deal.
| cap11235 wrote:
| eg, consider WiFi. They choose their bands carefully for
| wireless standards, and terahertz is pretty far from
| microwave GHz. I've never seen direct THz synthesis
| outside of partially-insane radar engineers.
| ben_w wrote:
| I have no idea why this might be limited by the light
| source being collimated?
|
| I mean, you _can_ get electricity from PV illuminated by a
| laser, and everything I 've heard so far says it's easier
| than with sunlight because you can match the frequency of
| the laser to the band gap of the PV.
| malfist wrote:
| Sure, you absolutely can do it. But material science
| quickly becomes a major limit.
|
| For something 15% efficient like a high quality PV cell,
| for every 100 watts you want to be usable on the
| receiving side, the receiver has to bleed off 566 watts
| of heat. And that's 566 watts of waste heat that is
| highly concentrated.
|
| Consider a single residental power circuit. 12A maximum,
| 120v, that's 1440 watts at delivery. For PV power
| delivery via laser, that PV would need to dissipate 8
| kilowatts of waste heat. One a very small surface
| ben_w wrote:
| It sounds like you're mistaking PV for a thermal system.
|
| In a PV cell, you have a semiconductor. Semiconductors
| have this thing called a "band gap", which is the energy
| needed to get an electron from the valence band to the
| conduction band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band_gap
|
| The limits to efficiency of a solar panel is that
| sunlight has photons of many energy levels; the photons
| with energy less than the band gap do nothing, those with
| more, waste the excess.
|
| A laser can have energy _tuned to this band gap_ , at
| which point the PV part becomes ~99.9% efficient. (The
| _laser_ part is not close to that efficiency).
| malfist wrote:
| I'm not talking about a thermal system, I'm talking about
| having to deal with the thermals of your inefficiencies.
| That energy that doesn't get converted to electricity is
| converted to heat. And you have to deal with it.
|
| The type of laser based PV that you're taking about
| that's highly tuned is at maximum 27% efficient. Not 99%.
|
| That's a 73% waste you have to manage
| demod6 wrote:
| "trying to make a solar panel generate electricity from a
| laser beam" is literally what the article is about.
| Maxsnijders wrote:
| If you were to go that way, why not a wire?
| Havoc wrote:
| Seems like that has a high chance of frying sensors on sats
| flying behind the drone though
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| This seems very silly. It's either a death ray project in a fake
| mustache or somebody had earmarked a bunch of money that they had
| to spend before it expired.
| kulahan wrote:
| This is kinda surprising to read. I've never known anyone who
| isn't incredibly excited at least at the prospect of wireless
| energy transfers. If you can do 800 watts over 8 km, surely we
| can do 150 watts across 3 feet in the household, and MANY of
| our most important discoveries come from DARPA essentially
| being a black budget skunkworks team.
|
| But much of the stuff DARPA does seems weird. It's not about
| ideas with solid foundation and thorough engineering, it's
| about crapshoots that might work and would pay off in some way
| - often any financially feasible way.
|
| They once put "cats" on guns in hopes it would surprise
| opponents even just for a quarter second, giving your spec ops
| dudes the advantage. They tried to create angled guns that
| could shoot around corners like 20 years ago. All kinds of
| crazy stuff! It would be a lot of fun to work there, I think.
| christkv wrote:
| The germans tried the curved gun with an attachment called
| Krummlauf during ww2. It would break after just a couple of
| magazines being fired.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krummlauf
|
| Not sure how you would build one of those without the stress
| of the bullet during firing would not damage the barrel.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| I'm amazed that worked for even one shot. Presumably gp was
| referring to cornershot or something similar, which seems
| like a much more reasonable approach.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Yeah, every gun person on youtube capable of getting one
| has demonstrated it. Unsurprisingly, you cannot aim for
| shit on these things, and their intended use can be fully
| replaced by a hand-mirror with a much better rifle (aka,
| most rifles), without fucking up your barrel trying to
| curve bullets.
| kulahan wrote:
| I meant a 90deg angled gun. You pull at one end, but all
| firing happens at the other, out of a straight barrel. Idea
| being that you can then collapse it to a flat rifle.
| erikerikson wrote:
| The actual work is usually done by private companies under
| contract
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > They tried to create angled guns that could shoot around
| corners like 20 years ago
|
| The IDF got a gun that does this[0] into service in 2003.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CornerShot
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Reminded me of "Wanted" (2008)[0]
|
| [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493464/
| JetSpiegel wrote:
| It's the same gun, Angelina Jolie trained with the IDF.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The problem with wireless energy is that the efficiency
| losses are mostly because of physics, not because of
| technology just needing to scale up a bit more.
|
| A future with having wireless energy transfer everywhere is
| one where energy is so abundant that we don't mind throwing
| out 80% of it powering wireless things.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Ignoring efficiency, you can deal with "physics" by just
| eliminating matter in the way, like air, via a strong
| enough laser. I'm not sure I'd suggest this as a consumer
| product, though.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| "reflects onto dozens of photovoltaic cells arranged around the
| inside of the device which convert the energy back to usable
| power."
|
| This is no different that what we were considering two decades
| ago for the space elevator competition. One of the problems with
| this approach is that as the photovoltaic cells heat up their
| overall efficiency decreases.
| bagels wrote:
| They'll only get so hot, and you can just spread the energy
| across more cells, right?
| IX-103 wrote:
| You end up with a thermal runaway situation where the hotter
| the photovoltaics get, the more energy they convert to heat
| (instead of reflecting or converting to electricity).
| inasio wrote:
| "It's a lot easier to send a power beam directly up or down
| relative to the ground because there is so much less atmosphere
| to fight through," Jaffe explains. "For PRAD, we wanted to test
| under the maximum impact of atmospheric effects."
|
| Super impressive! My only complain is that this was done at the
| White Sounds desert in New Mexico, at over 1200 meters of
| elevation. For maximum impact they should have done it in Florida
| on a hot humid day
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| There's no range in Florida large enough for this test
| otherwise I'm sure they would have.
|
| Even Eglin wouldn't be large enough.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Humidity would most likely attenuate the beam from 20% end to
| end to less than 1% - water vapour absorbs energy like nobody's
| business.
|
| This is a tech for arid environments - which seem to be where
| the US does most of its deployments these days.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| "maximum impact of atmospheric effects" would be simply a foggy
| day...
| tnel77 wrote:
| Both your example and theirs would be better tests than a
| desert.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The desert is bad enough. On a hot day you get convection
| which will vary the refractive index of light and spread
| out the beam. I wonder if they have active optics on the
| transmitter to fight this.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Then you also have the day vs night weather patterns,
| resulting in intense sun-downer winds. I suggest everyone
| actually visit a real desert once in their life, where as
| people seem to think its like a beach, but bigger.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Around Elephant Butte Lake which is quite close to WSMR
| [1], I remember those really strong winds around sunset.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Butte_Reservoir
| freeone3000 wrote:
| The US is always geared up and ready to fight the previous
| war.
| sailfast wrote:
| Unless, you know, we often fight in deserts that are
| remote?
| tnel77 wrote:
| This is a good point. I just meant that a very humid
| climate might be a more challenging environment for this
| technology, but it doesn't mean it's as useful for real
| world fighting conditions.
| cryber wrote:
| The popcorn is a very nice touch
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> New Mexico_
|
| Great stuff.
|
| Do Seattle, next.
| Szpadel wrote:
| what concerns me is that it's wild laser beam in potentially
| public space. anyone that would accidentally cross that
| potentially invisible line could get killed or severely hurt.
|
| imagine something reflective entering this beam, it could blind
| people in a very large radius.
|
| for me it means that thus would still need some pipe/fiber that
| would protect world from this laser.
| seberino wrote:
| The eventual goal is to use it at extremely high altitude with
| drones so that that isn't much of a risk.
| DaftDank wrote:
| That will be quite a sight -- seeing the videos of people on
| the ground, filming future drone laser battles
| xattt wrote:
| The laser would ricochet from disintegrating drones (think of
| the props) and cause collateral damage to people on the
| ground.
|
| Also see this (with remaining eye):
| https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/07/how-i-got-my-laser-
| eye...
| echelon wrote:
| There's danger and risk in everything worth doing.
|
| The dams could burst and drown millions.
|
| The highrise you live in could topple over or burn.
|
| The bridge carrying the train could crash into the valley.
|
| The passenger plane could lose lift and crash into a
| residential building.
|
| The power source in your car could catch fire.
|
| We engineer around it.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| Counterpoint:
|
| We've known about global warming for almost 50 years and
| yet to this day the debate is divided between "eh" and
| "no, it isn't".
|
| Coal plants have been consistently depositing smog in our
| lungs with no end in sight.
|
| Boeing has successfully lobbied itself out of criminal
| charges for the deadly consequences of their (IMHO)
| negligence regarding the 737 Max.
|
| Companies have stopped pretending that they'll put human
| lives before profit. As a human, I am therefore beyond
| giving any company the benefit of the doubt that they'll
| "engineer around it" when it comes to safety.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Counterpoint: Military doesn't care or get prosecuted by
| anyone other than the military. Pew pew, motherfucker.
|
| Defense companies are rather refreshing to read for
| corporate postings, since they see to always be proud of
| how many Iraqi's they bulldozed to death.
| echelon wrote:
| > We've known about global warming for almost 50 years
| and yet to this day the debate is divided between "eh"
| and "no, it isn't".
|
| So much work is being done on that front.
|
| > Coal plants have been consistently depositing smog in
| our lungs with no end in sight.
|
| Not the #1 killer of humans. We're still making lots of
| progress on healthspan, especially in pulling people out
| of poverty. We're well ahead of where we were 50 years
| ago. People are no longer starving to death at
| unprecedented scale.
|
| > Boeing has successfully lobbied itself out of criminal
| charges for the deadly consequences of their (IMHO)
| negligence regarding the 737 Max.
|
| Sometimes bad things happen. Not to diminish these lives,
| but this is just a footnote in the list of impressive
| things technology and society have accomplished, though.
| Boeing and execs should face punishment, but this is a
| very small downside to a much greater set of
| accomplishments that vastly outweighs the bad.
|
| > Companies have stopped pretending that they'll put
| human lives before profit. As a human, I am therefore
| beyond giving any company the benefit of the doubt that
| they'll "engineer around it" when it comes to safety.
|
| What are you talking about? To just cite one instance,
| Waymo is already going to be one of the biggest needle
| movers in terms of human lives saved. Or another - look
| at what Moderna did during Covid.
|
| Life is better than it used to be, not worse. You're
| wearing miasma-tinted glasses.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _So much work is being done on that front._
|
| Yes, it is, but not nearly enough and it had to be done
| by dragging corporations kicking, lying and screaming
| every step of the way. Corporations, mind you, powerful
| enough to drive several of the wars of the last 50 years.
|
| > _We 're still making lots of progress on healthspan_
|
| Yes, as long as your health insurance covers the
| treatment. UnitedHealth investors are suing the company
| for not willing to follow the "aggressive, anti-consumer
| tactics" that got their CEO murdered [1].
|
| I've also personally heard a mildly drunk executive of a
| Fortune 500 company brag about how, on a cancer-related
| lawsuit, the US government would never let them go
| bankrupt because that would dry up the taxes they would
| collect otherwise. Time proved him right.
|
| > _Boeing and execs should face punishment, but..._
|
| They should, but they won't. And they are not the
| exception.
|
| > _Waymo is already going to be one of the biggest needle
| movers in terms of human lives saved (...) look at what
| Moderna did during Covid._
|
| Uber made ignoring the laws at a worldwide scale their
| whole business model. And how has the market rewarded
| Moderna for their to humanity? Their stock is at its
| lowest since 2020.
|
| People have been making the comparison to the robber
| barons recently, but I think they miss the point where
| the robber barons didn't have a worldwide surveillance
| apparatus and the kind of propaganda power that Orwell
| could only dream of.
|
| I agree that technology has advanced for good in a lot of
| areas, but I also think it's worth noticing that many of
| these advances are behind gatekeepers who will burn a
| forest to the ground before upgrading infrastructure
| that's one hundred years old to keep shareholders happy.
|
| [1] https://futurism.com/neoscope/unitedhealthcare-
| investors-wil...
| cryptonector wrote:
| Yes, but this [beaming large amounts of power wirelessly
| over long distances] isn't worth doing.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Also, an implicit but obvious goal is military applications.
| Murder laser beams are a potential benefit in those cases.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They tested that thing at the White Sands Missile Range where
| the public is excluded.
|
| A friend of mine was looking for a stargazing spot between WSMR
| and the Rio Grande River a fair bit south of San Antonio, NM
| and got her Chevy Blazy stuck and figured her best bet was to
| walk across the security perimeter and get caught by the
| security force and they caught her pretty quickly.
| Xevion wrote:
| TIL San Antonio is not just a city in Texas where I live, but
| also a place in New Mexico. That's crazy.
| mulmen wrote:
| San Antonio is Spanish for "Saint Anthony". The city in
| Texas is well known but there are many places in the world
| that share the name.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Famous (or not) for a few things:
|
| (1) You always hear it wrongly repeated that the first
| nuclear bomb was tested at Alamagordo but Alamagordo is 100
| miles from the Trinity Site. San Antonio, NM was the
| closest settlement.
|
| (2) Conrad Hilton, founder of the hotel chain, was born
| there (in his autobiography "Be My Guest" he talks about
| riding his horse up to Socorro, where I went to undergrad
| school)
|
| (3) The Owl Bar and Cafe still serves a great green chili
| cheeseburger
|
| https://sanantonioowl.com/
|
| there was that time I ran from Socorro to San Antonio in a
| race and, despite being underage, got offered a beer from
| the bartender.
| triceratops wrote:
| It's crazy that two states have cities of the same name?
| dooglius wrote:
| This strategy went very poorly for the Death Valley Germans
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676129
| _verandaguy wrote:
| IMO there's two safe ways to implement this:
|
| - Ground-satellite-ground relaying, with at least one
| geostationary satellite between the ground stations. The
| satellites being geostationary means that the path of the beam
| through the atmosphere is constant, and air traffic can be
| routed around them in a reasonable way. (You could do this with
| lower orbits, but it'd be a hassle with current aviation
| industry technology).
|
| - Beaming by tunnel! Can't get hit by a laser if it's under
| your feet. Obviously, this negates the benefits of the
| technology, and just turns into fibre lines without the fibre,
| over shorter distances, with all the pain in the ass of laying
| underground cable.
|
| In the first approach, there'd have to be an effective
| exclusion zone around the receiving station (how big, I don't
| know), and it'd be nice to have satellites fail safe, so that
| if they end up pitching or rolling off axis, the beam will be
| shut off before becoming an accidental weapon.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Geostationary orbit is way way too far and tunnels? Really?
| cap11235 wrote:
| As opposed to?
| _verandaguy wrote:
| Geostationary orbit is very far, yes. If you read my
| comment you can see my reasoning for this.
|
| And tunnels, not really, no, if you read my comment you'll
| see that this is a comically impractical option.
| pjaffeva wrote:
| Safety has been demonstrated with a "virtual enclosure",
| albeit at a smaller scale: https://youtu.be/Xb9THqrXd4I
| westurner wrote:
| Is it possible to steer the weather by heating the atmosphere
| with power beaming microwaves?
|
| Is it possible to cancel the vortical formation of a tornado or a
| hurricane with microwave power beam(s)?
|
| Does heating the atmosphere with microwaves change the weather,
| or the jet stream, or the cloud cover?
|
| What sort of a fluidic weather simulator could answer this
| question?
|
| Is there a fluid simulation device that allows for precise
| wireless heating of certain points in the fluid?
|
| If so, there could be international space law to study and
| control for the known and presumed risks of space-based microwave
| power beaming.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Nuking a hurricane would not break it because nukes are not big
| enough https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/26/weather/hurricane-
| nuclear...
|
| I think it's possible to nuke a tornado, but if someone does it
| to try to save a city, I expect even more destruction.
|
| I don't expect the beam to be energetic enough to change
| anything. The closest method I can think of is
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding but it doesn't
| distribute energy, just tiny crystals to condense oversaturated
| vapor.
| westurner wrote:
| Theoretically there is at least one point where a butterfly
| flapping its wings sufficiently affects seemingly nonlocal
| global weather.
|
| Presumably it's easier to prevent formation of vortices far
| before visible formation.
|
| A "cancel vortices" sim table might be more useful than the
| average CFD simulation.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| This will come in handy when DARPA builds the Phaser Cannon used
| to blast the Talosian fortress under the direction of Number One
| in the 23rd Century ...
| neya wrote:
| Finally they decided to open up Nikola Tesla's work huh? :)))
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