Laser-wielding boffins bend lightning to their will Scientists have for the first time demonstrated that a laser can act as a lightning rod to disperse these dangerous atmospheric discharges. Although lab-based demos have proven the concept, an experiment conducted on the Säntis Mountain in northeastern Switzerland in late 2021 - and only detailed in Nature this week - showed …
Religion is what you worship. You are an idolater if you worship technology. Islam says "they worship what they make with their own hands".
Those worshiping money, technology, nationalism or other people are insane idolaters.
By the way, the atheists claim that they make the technology but it's the other way around it's the technology that blinds them: they are just idolaters.
In other words, there is no opposition between technology and pure monotheism : it is Islam that radically changed the way we abstract the world, the problem is in the relation people have with things they make with their hands and worship.
Like the Titanic, they said "even God can't sink it". An ice cube will do...
Hopefully by modulating the laser and using, say, a grid of emitters or possibly reflective surfaces that can fire in turn, the storm energy could be pulsed more gently into an array of storage cells - maybe heating salt water or silica in underground vats. It's hopeful that the seemingly random pattern of lightning strikes could become more directed and controllable.
I hope this can make power.
Because replacing Benjamin Franklin's solution that has a very low CO2 cost, with this high tech and high power solution seems like its not progress at all.
Cool tech. But not practical until we have, free energy, no planes, and a power supply that does randomly turn off in bad weather.
It's not massively clear from the video, but the laser beam guides the strike towards the tower (since a big metal structure has a much lower impedance than a thin ionised pathway through the air).
This protects the laser and the focusing telescope (they called it a telescope, so I will too) as the current gets diverted away from the ionised path running down to the big ol' death ray machine.
In lightning strikes, there's typically a "small" strike from cloud to earth followed milliseconds later by a "big" return stroke. All the things affected by lightning don't really care which way the electrons are running, just that there's so many of them.
"The laser is powerful enough to be a risk to the eyes of overflying pilots, and during the experiments air traffic was closed over the test site."
The idea is to extend the lightning rod effect. It's a game of probabilities - the higher it reaches, the more likely it is that it will discharge a lightning strike instead of the bolt zapping something else. The idea is to provide the easiest path for the charge to take, in this case via ionisation.
You will still need something to duct the result to Earth, so you would still have a (few) lightning rod(s), or a Tesla with no tyres on its rims - something that connects to ground and you don't mind terribly losing if it gets a bit too much in one go.
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