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Scientists Are Using Lasers to Control Lightning Strikes

A group of scientists have successfully steered lightning bolts with a laser for the first time in history.

The experiment occurred on top of the Swiss Mountains during a heavy thunderstorm last year.

Scientists accomplished the feat by firing rapid laser pulses at a group of thunderclouds for over six hours.

Instruments recording the laser’s blasts were able to detect four lightning bolts being deflected from its course.

The Guardian reported the science behind the experiment:

The laser diverts lightning bolts by creating an easier path for the electrical discharge to flow down. When laser pulses are fired into the sky, a change in the refractive index of the air makes them shrink and become so intense that they ionise air molecules around them.

This leads to a long chain of what the researchers call filaments in the sky, where air molecules rapidly heat up and race away at supersonic speeds, leaving a channel of low density, ionised air. These channels, which last for milliseconds, are more electrically conductive than the surrounding air, and so form an easier path for the lightning to follow.

Although, the new feat could help prevent forest fires or tall buildings from being struck, many believe the newfound ability to steer lightning bolts will be used for ill will.

Throughout history, weather manipulation has been used as a war tactic.

Back during the Vietnam War, the CIA launched Operation Popeye which was a seed clouding operation that caused monsoon rain to hit the Ho Chi Minh Trail which resulted in damaged crops and major mudslides.

READ 8 COMMENTS
  • Louis Galmarini says:

    This is NOT new. This has been known (and used) for decades, now. This is how they start the forest fires in the southwest every year. Weather-modification has been honed also to science. HAARP in Alaska is responsible for 90% of all hurricanes which have occurred in the past 20 years. It triggered Katrina, and many, many others. It’s the eco-terrorists manning the operations at HAARP who want to de-populate huge swaths of the country, allowing it to ‘return to its natural state’, (read: forests). Slowly but surely they are discouraging entire populations from living/remaining in certain areas of the country, (New Orleans, etc.), and their goal is total de-population by 2050.

    • I’ve seen it, actually. Flown over it a few times hauling cargo to the villages west of Fairbanks.
      I’ve read that the russians invented the technology for use as an early warning system against our ICBMs. We discovered it’s existance when scientists kept hearing the ultral low frequency radio signals it was giving off.
      All it can do is momentarily excite a small area of particles in the ionosphere, which does heat them up a fraction of a degree. Way too high to have any effect on lightening storms, let alone hurricanes or cyclones, certainly not earthquakes.
      The energy it would take to do what you’re talking about would be astronomical if possible at all, not to mention that the antenna array is so small it would probably melt into a puddle of aluminum in an instant.
      Not only that but it only goes straight up. It can’t be directed at an angle at all, no way it could cause or effect a hurricane in the gulf or the atlantic.

      Hate to be a dick but that’s just crazy talk.

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