Huge Tesla Coils Will Recreate Natural Lightning 199
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.'"
Exciting! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Exciting! (Score:4, Funny)
I will never forgive the SyFy channel for perverting the spelling of "Sci-Fi".
Not to mention killing off Stargate... or any decent show for that matter. We're now stuck with rubbish like Eureka.
Maybe they've done some surveys and decided that their target audience should actually be a bunch of retards.
Re:Exciting! (Score:5, Insightful)
We're now stuck with rubbish like Eureka.
Eureka has been canceled.
You are stuck with rubbish like Ghost Hunters.
Re:Exciting! (Score:5, Interesting)
I will never forgive the SyFy channel for perverting the spelling of "Sci-Fi".
Bonnie Hammer's successor stated that it was because they couldn't get copyright on "Sci-fi".
Not to mention killing off Stargate... or any decent show for that matter. We're now stuck with rubbish like Eureka.
They've had a history of that. Take Sliders for example. They tried very hard to kill it off because "it wasn't getting the numbers we wanted." Cast changes, writer changes ... but it was still popular. Ms. Hammer, in her infinite wisdom, ultimately decided that Sci-Fi couldn't afford to keep it in production because they'd committed to a season of "Next Wave", in her words "a guaranteed hit." Turned out to be a guaranteed flop, but by then Sliders was history.
Maybe they've done some surveys and decided that their target audience should actually be a bunch of retards.
Yes, considering that they've put on psychics, wrestling, and a number of other drain-bamaged shows in an effort to broaden their viewer base. Hey, dimbulbs ... what color is the sky in your world? John Edwards is not science fiction! There are plenty of other cable channels that cover that crap: I tuned in to their channel because they were offering something special. In the end, what they achieved was the alienation of the viewers who watched their programming because it was the SCIENCE-fiction channel!
... not "so bad they're good", they're just stupid) rather than pumping that capital into some more quality TV series.
The only retards here are the drain-bamaged fools run that operation. The Sci-Fi Channel, back in its heyday with the likes of Sliders, Stargate and other great shows was about the only reason I bothered to have cable TV. Certainly wasn't for the lame selection of movies that most cable companies offer. Now they spend millions making some of the most incredibly bad movies (and I mean bad
It's even more depressing when I see all the ex-Stargate actors and actresses showing up in SyFy's movies.
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Yeah, I think the whole downfall started with Bonnie. Wasn't she the one that kicked Bab5 off to TNT (or somebody?)?
There was also another really bizarre reason given back then why they were changing the name. Something about bringing in non-geeks while trying to keep the geeks and blah blah... The mental backflips they were doing on that one was amazing.
Once SyFy put wrestling on, I gave up. I watch Eureka, but only because I find it funny. The science may be bad, but I prefer a bad science joke than
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I can't wait for the SyFy movie based on the 'true story' :)
Here you go:
http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-lightning-strikes-twice.html [discovery.com]
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I can't wait for the SyFy movie based on the 'true story' :)
There was one SyFy (I still choke when I type that) where they had to use a giant Tesla-coil-like thing at some Arctic research base to realign the Earth's magnetic field or some such nonsense. It was on TV one evening: the movie was so bad I had to turn it off.
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Actually, I think the lightning monster was from the artificial black hole movie. Yes, I do enjoy watching these crappy movies. :D
Re:Exciting! (Score:4, Funny)
Ironically yesterday there was a SyFy movie about the topic of a madman controlling the weather from his iPhone.
There's a zap for that.
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there needs to be a +1 uuuggggghhhh.
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there needs to be a +1 uuuggggghhhh.
You can get a 100% refund of the cover charge at the door.
In other news... (Score:3)
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That's not irony. That's just a coincidence.
It's not much of a coincidence; nothing coincided. Technically it's an example of 'something slightly relevant to this conversation'.
Re:Exciting! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Exciting! (Score:5, Insightful)
At the risk of sounding like a dick, I have to say that's not even wrong. Lightning and em fields don't work that way.
Well, since we're discussing SyFy Channel movies, I have to say that not a single one of them has ever been based on anything resembling science, science-fiction or reality. Really, you'd think they could at least consult a local college physics instructor before throwing this crap out there. Of course, the only difference between a SyFy Channel flick and a Roland Emmerich production is that he a. gets bigger name actors and b. spends more on special effects that ten year's worth of SyFy's movie budgets.
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Not all, just most.
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Haven't most of the SyFy(lis) channels movies been cheap monster movies, with but a single monster each? Not all, just most.
Yeah, pretty much. There was the one flick that had none other than Stargate's Samantha Carter in it, where some kind of new power plant generated an artificial black hole that (of course) threatened the entire planet. There was another where a cache of pterodactyl eggs hatched and a whole bunch of the things were flying around eating people. And of course, one of the single-monster jobs you mentioned, starring Corin Nemec.
I can't believe I've actually watched those movies. I don't anymore. Besides, sinc
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I watch them for their B-movie/Ed Wood flair. Since I can't stand what is considered comedy now a days, I find SyFy (that name gets worse every time I type it) movies fill that comedy gap. Especially if I can get my wife to watch one with me so we can mock the "science." Her favorites are the various shark movies, as she is a big shark fan (as in real sharks, not movies). She did almost beat me when I lured her in about another "shark movie," while neglecting to tell her the name was "Sharktapus." Heh,
Re:Exciting! (Score:4, Funny)
I thought "Sharktapus" was a documentary!
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Re:Exciting! (Score:5, Informative)
the electromagnetic field between the phone and antenna tower would provide a path for the lightening
To make the lightning actually hit the poor sod on the phone, you would need to ensure that the bridge generated by the field between the phone and tower was the path of leaast resistance for the lightning to follow. While it may create a path of (microscopically lower than the air) lower resistance, it would still need to become the optimal path - which is where it would fall down.
You would have more luck trying to get the guy to play golf swinging metal sticks around, or better yet stand on top of a sand dune in the desert during a storm. In fact it would be much easier to try to rig the house of the person and call their landline (as long as it isn't a wireless phone, but one of the old fashioned curly cord types) and get the lightning to to id that way. There are many more documented cases where lightning has travelled along phone cables [snopes.com]. This is because the resistance differential offered by a metal cable is in the order of many many magnitudes higher then the resistance differential offered by an EM field.
It's like trying to divert a huge river with two options, one is a path in the sand drawn with your finger (That's the EM field) and the other option to divert is with a Panama sized canal (that's the metal phone cable). The lightning will try to pick the path of least resistance from the clouds to the ground, but the likelihood that the path just happens to be the EM field caused by the phone signal is so miniscule that it is almost not plausible. A wet tree, a telegraph pole, an overhead wire, a nearby hill or even a lightning rod would almost always provide a path of lower resistance.
Not saying it isn't theoretically possible, but to be able to "set it up" to happen just at the right moment when a call is made to "kill" the person isn't realistically plausible.
Re:Exciting! (Score:5, Funny)
Not saying it isn't theoretically possible, but to be able to "set it up" to happen just at the right moment when a call is made to "kill" the person isn't realistically plausible.
Well, if you had a high-powered microwave beam capable of ionizing the air above the person you are trying to assassinate you might have better luck. Of course, from a practical standpoint you might as well just cook him with the thing and forget the lightning.
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Of course, from a practical standpoint you might as well just cook him with the thing and forget the lightning.
Yup, it could in theory be done, but by the time you address all the things that you would need to, there would be a multitude of other ways to achieve the same purpose that were more reliable, easier and more believable to a reader of a science fiction story.
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If you really want to get away with it, make it the most obvious weapon. If someone is killed by anthrax, they can get a sample and depending on the exact genetics, they can trace it back to the lab it came from. If the protagonist in the novel needs to kill someone on the hush, have the guy hit by a car then burn the car or throw it into a chop shop. Or steal the car. Things that are "unlikely" tend to be only able to be performed by a select few - meaning that the pool of possible suspects is already a re
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Goldfinger: "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die".
And, as usual, he doesn't. Just shoot him already.
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Shine a UV laser beam from near the top of a high building (with the lightning rods disconnected from the ground) to the guy with the phone. That could ionize a conductive path to the victim, which the lightning could follow on its way through the victim to the ground. Use the cell phone signal as the trigger to greatly increase the beam strength (to give the friggin' cell phone a role in this Rube Goldberg scheme). Also maybe shine another one straight up into the storm.
Complicated? Of course not. Sim
Re:Exciting! (Score:5, Funny)
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I always wanted my hair permed! :D But of course all that hardware would be remotely controlled, along with the cloud seeding blimp to encourage the lightning to start at the right time.
Hmm. I wonder if we could get the victim to stand on a platform that just happens to be charged up to make it a better target.
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along with the cloud seeding blimp to encourage the lightning to start at the right time
Actually, cloud seeding is likely to supress lightning rather than create it [ncsu.edu] mainly by supressing hail that can cause intracloud lightning.
There are currently three known ways to trigger lightning [wikipedia.org] which might be plausible.
1) Launch a rocket - Some rockets unspool wire as they launch which acts as a lovely lightning rod back to the ground - however somewhat obvious if this is supposed to be a clean as a whistle murder though.
2) Have a volcano erupt - Volcanos often form lightning storms near their volcanic p
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... wait, wouldn't a laser that powerful be capable of killing someone outright?
(*whoooosh*, I suppose. :P )
Wasn't this mentioned a week ago? (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't this essentially a dupe of:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/11/17/1540235/working-on-man-made-lightning [slashdot.org]
Re:Wasn't this mentioned a week ago? (Score:5, Funny)
Welcome to Slashdot. You must be new here.
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Well, newer than me, anyway.
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I'm quite sure your comment is a dupe, too. I think I've seen the same before. Well actually it's more than just a dupe. A dupe of a dupe of a dupe of a... well you get the idea.
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You must be old here.
Most important question (Score:3)
Will they also play music [youtube.com] on them?
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This one is even more nutsy- no poles, just the suit. It really has to be disconcerting when the lightning is hitting his head.
Lightning is a DC not an AC Electric arc? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That's a good point. Further, AC transmits electricity. I have a tiny tesla coil in my room that can light up a flourescent bulb from some distance. I'm betting he's gonna blow out all his own equipment the first time he turns it on. I'll give him bonus points if he can spread that EMP burst out enough to fry electronics in nearby homes.
Re:Lightning is a DC not an AC Electric arc? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm betting he's gonna blow out all his own equipment the first time he turns it on.
FTFA:
Tesla coils have an uncanny ability to short out modern electronics—anything from erasing voice mails to blowing out computer screens. To guard against this, the LOD teams usually places “nearby electronics in shielded enclosures,” or they run the coils “far, far away,” Leyh said.
I know. I must be new here, I read TFA. After a while here, you don't read TFA. Later on still, you don't even read TFS.
On the absolute existential plain of eternal bliss, you don't even read the title, either. You just post.
However, I agree with your comment . . . which is why I want to be there when he fires that critter up, and all the ensuing pandemonium rages. Maybe it'll create a Black Hole, and the Higgs Boson will pop out of it. CERN really let us all down there, with the end of the universe, and an angry God appearing looking for His Particle.
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Once one reaches /. zen they no longer need to even read TFC either.
It's fairly boring though as I can only stand to read fifty or so RE:s of the same subject.
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You don't need to read the subjects either. Just locate the nearest comment modded to +5 and post your own as a reply to that. If you say something about 1984, it's practically always considered on-topic hereabouts.
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Looks like the DC ate your sig!
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Hi Kurt,
Since we're attempting to trigger a relativistic runaway breakdown, all that matters is that the formation time is short compared to one period of AC.
The predicted formation time for a relativistic avalanche is 10's of microseconds, and the 10-story coilforms resonate at a very low frequency (about 5200Hz) so for all practical purposes the slow-moving coil output will appear as high voltage DC during the avalanche.
-Greg Leyh
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Atmosphere (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully they're building this over a smallish castle + mad scientist lab with convenient skylights, along with the worlds largest knife switch
Re:Atmosphere (Score:5, Funny)
Where to put a 10' story Tesla coil (Score:5, Informative)
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....
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As long as nobody will sue them if he infringes on some imaginary property, they won't give a shit.
Re:Where to put a 10' story Tesla coil (Score:5, Informative)
So building a 10' Tesla coil is probably not the hard problem
It's not 10'. It's 10 stories, so more like 100' Tesla coils. I would call that hard.
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BTW to me it looks like a giant breast.
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That's gonna be one huge enclosure then.
The coils themselves 10 stories tall, the towers 260' apart - that's quite big. But the enclosure will have to be far enough from the coils to not attract the sparks: you want the sparks between the towers, not between a tower and the enclosure. So that should be easily a 20 stories tall enclosure.
And to make matters worse, no supports are possible, as naturally a support would become too close to the coils. Really wonder how they would go about that. The biggest un
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Build your lighting
Re:Where to put a 10' story Tesla coil (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the radiated output from the coils will be quite low, owing to several factors:
A) The operating frequency is *very* low, only 5200 Hz. This is actually *below* the frequency range the FCC controls.
B) The wavelength (over 35 miles) is *very* long compared to the coil height, so it's radiation efficiency is almost zero.
C) The two coils operate in opposite phase, so the electric fields will tend to cancel at a distance.
Of greater concern will be the actual *acoustic* noise... which might be upwards of 10's of kilowatts.
-Greg Leyh
the RFI will be a mess (Score:2)
This story is everywhere in the last two weeks (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Or maybe go with van der graaf generators instead.
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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.
Say, a Cockroft-Walton [wikipedia.org] generator?
Yay! (Score:2)
>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.
Great! They'll communicate with aliens too! (Score:5, Interesting)
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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I wonder what exactly they are going to respond to us with. e.g. "Ahh...
Radio waves. Meh. (Score:3)
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 civ
You cannot walk through a wormhole (Score:3)
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 t
fucking autocorrect! (Score:2)
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.
some kinds of signals may be not quite random (Score:2)
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 cleartex
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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.)
only low frequencies bounce off the ionosphere (Score:2)
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
Understanding how lightning forms (Score:2)
Siberian Institute for Power Engineering? Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Lightning as a power source? (Score:2)
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 (c
District 9 weapon (Score:2)
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 u
Lightning protection (Score:2)
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.
Make them tetrahedral coils! (Score:2)
Repeat the Philadelphia experiment! I still want to know what happened! - for real
High energy particles (Score:2)
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
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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.
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Things that make you go BOOM! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm having horrible flashbacks to C&C: Red Alert.
I'm having horrible flashbacks to C&C: Music Factory.
Re:Should Siberia evacuate? (Score:5, Informative)
Tesla's bad assery [badasshistory.com] 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 [tfcbooks.com] 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...
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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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
Tesla was 100 years ahead of his time (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [sciencemag.org]
If Tesla was 100 years ahead of everyone else, that means we should be plugging our devices into the Aether ("The wheelwork of nature" [google.com]) soon.
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Ultra low frequency radio waves also penetrate deep into rock.
The PED system has been around since 1990. It is one-way only and used for paging and remote control. The receivers can be intergrated into a miner's cap lamp.
PED Communication and Early Warning System [minesite.com.au]
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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
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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 [wikipedia.org]
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 inductio
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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.
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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 jus
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.