[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

Can masers modify the weather?



Above is a crystal which when stimulated to emit radiation, it emits microwaves. It works like any crystal laser but emits microwaves.  I thought what this could be used for and I thought perhaps if it was powerful enough it could be it could be sent through a microwave equivalent to a concave lens to spread the beam out a little and have the spot light like beam hit a cloud.

The Maser would be tuned like a microwave oven to hit the resonance of water. Sense clouds are made of water vapor then the beam would heat the cloud in an unnatural way which would make the cloud disperse into the surrounding air as humidity.

If you didn't want it to rain to (desertify a land to buy it for cheap) then allow the rain again to lush everything back up and sell it again for quadrupedal the price. [?]

[alancalverd]

Brilliant. Now calculate the power (in kilowatts) required to disperse one cloud over, say, a square mile, and multiply by the number of hours in the five years it takes to desertify the area (clouds have a habit of drifting across the landscape). Multiply by about 100 to take account of the most efficient laser/maser system conversion efficiency (about 1%) and then by 0.2 to convert the cost of this exercise into £ sterling. Is this a good investment, or would you have done better to spend the money on farming the square mile?   

[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

There will be plenty of sun so the energy can come from a large array of solar panels under the guise that I'm a solar farmer. plus you don't have to hit every single cloud, just the ones which threaten to rain on my future land.  []  You just ave to take a day out one time every few weeks or so when the weather Chanel forecasts rain over my land.

time over a year to take out operating monster masers, about maybe 90 days the masers could very well be robotic so they would disperse clouds via a program after I hit the "arm all masers button". not quite a full time deal, just a lot of waiting for it to want to rain. meanwhile sell all that left over power during the time you don't need it from the solar array or power your house, that way your guise as a solar farmer has some credibility.

It will probably need 6 to 10 mounted on hills or mountain slops  maser beams to hit a storm from various angles in a devilishly sanctimonious way.

I was just pulling your leg take it easy. I would only ever use a maser to break electronics from a distance. such as the electronics aboard invading enemy aircraft.

[alancalverd]

Never mind the "maybes", do some elementary calculations. Or even use common sense: if the energy comes from the sun, why doesn't it evaporate the cloud in the first place, instead of wasting iiself in the inefficiencies of solar cells, lasers and masers?

If you can get an adequate fix on an approaching aircraft, you would do better to destroy it with a rocket. Beam weapons can in principle have a very high rate of fire and unlimited repetition, but the enemy can only have a finite number of planes, travelling at finite speeds, and a rocket can penetrate clouds and ignore mirrors.

[evan_au]

You might be better using a magnetron from a microwave oven, which has around 60-70% efficiency, much better than a maser. Plus, mass production makes them very cheap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavity_magnetron#Common_features
But it's probably more efficient to put up an umbrella if you wan to keep the rain off.

[alancalverd]

I would only ever use a maser to break electronics from a distance. such as the electronics aboard invading enemy aircraft.

All aviators, from the lowliest parascender to the apogee of astronauts, begin their flying training with no electronics. They help for navigation over long distances, but aren't needed for close combat or ground attack. Since your maser is a line-of-sight device, it is vulnerable to anyone flying "visual" with guns or rockets, and useless against anyone launching his weapons over the horizon - say a toss bomb or a cruise missile.

[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

Oh [] ok I see now why masers wont work, I didn't realize how horribly inefficient masers are. [] even though I did. So masers wouldn't be yor best choice to use if you wanted to break up a cloud.  It would be far more efficient to use a few high powered microwave dishes. I woudnt need something as focused as maser anyway. I more or less need a powerful microwave spotlight.



Perhaps something like this with a solar pannel array.

Thanks for helping a potential madd sscientist figure out how to better control the weather  []

What if I actually intended to do something like this? You would basically be accomplesses through conspiracy to control the weather for personal gain. Thaks smart guys now a evil yet nonsence idea has more of a possibility of working. Truthfully the reason i posted this idea was to see if you guys would help evil provail blindly. I knew masers wouldn't work to control the weather. My point is, scientists just like you would be able to create evil things in this world and you would help it come into existance by suggesting better ways to do it why?  Its not just you, scientsts have made terrifying inventions in the past like the H bomb and people just like you helped it get there in the first place. You too could help invent terrifying weapons but should you? My point is have some common sense not to help a terroristic idea from coming int this world.

[alancalverd]

To the best of my knowledge, there is no controllable power source sufficient to modify weather consistently over more than a square mile. Cloud seeding probably worked at Chernobyl for a few days, but it was horrendously expensive.

You can mitigate high cloud formation by preventing aircraft flying overhead, and disperse fog for a few minutes by burning vast quantities of petrol along the sides of a runway, but if a cumulus or nimbus decides it's going to rain on your parade, nothing short of an atom bomb can stop it.

Terrorism only requires a small knife and a bit of observational psychology. Society will provide all the rest of the weaponry, free of charge.

[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

Terrorism only takes a small knife but it can be done with more sophisticated weapons.  Such as weather modification or the H bomb. And only intelligent individuals have the ability to create such weapons, like scientists and engineers.

Not usually under their own will either.  A rocket can be used to go to the moon or blow up a nation, A bomb can be used to mine precious minerals from the earth or kill savagely. A satellite can be used to learn more about the universe or spy on people. Technology is neutral all and all, it is the user's intention which makes technology do good or evil.

What I wanted to find out is, would ordinary scientists advice evil doers how to use technology to do clear and obvious evil? I found that nobody objected to the stated evil intention which I made clear. I found that you tried to steer me in the right direction to do obvious evil.

I said I wanted to take advantage of the weather to take advantage of people in a sinister way.  You say it's impossible to control the weather without huge amounts of power and money. You feel certain that no harm could come from telling me exactly what I would have to do to modify the weather because you deem it impossible.

At one point people thought that flying machines were impossible but the right brothers proved otherwise.  You might think weather control is impossible but someone out in the world might know how to do it properly and practically, what if that person posted what he knew here on my thread. That would mean that an evil doer would have gotten the answer they were looking for.

Real evil organizations do exist, some are powerful too. They would go to much greater lengths to seek out the right people to find the answers and build such a device for evil intentions "weather" or not it has to do with microwaves or cloud seeding.

I mean to say, is there a moral compass for all scientists (evidently not) all someone has to do is ask the right people and they might get a practical answer on how to build monstrous things regardless of the clear evil intent.

At what point should scientists say no I wont tell you how because you would only use it to harm people.  thousands of scientists around the world work on building newer and deadlier weapons for various military organizations. In fact most scientist and engineers work for those military powers. They seem not to care that their creations are used to kill others, you might ask a weapons developer why he builds weapons.  He might answer to kill terrorists. Analise that last statement



A terrorist is who ever they want them to be.

[alancalverd]

Terrorism only takes a small knife but it can be done with more sophisticated weapons.  Such as weather modification or the H bomb.

Not at all. Terrorism is what other people do. "Other people" do not have nuclear weapons, which are of course purely for the defence of democracy - ask any North Korean. (where is the tongue-in-cheek smiley?)

The most successful terrorists are those with Kalashnikovs and sharp sticks: they have taken power in the American Colonies (OK, pre-AK47, but you get my meaning), Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Afghanistan, most of Africa, and now the Middle East. 

Let's look at your weather control microwave dish. There are thousands of these already on the ground and in the air, pumping gigawatts into the atmosphere to no effect whatever.

As for "not caring" whether your creation will kill others, you are way off the mark. The engineers I know who work on weapons systems are using every resource at their command to kill lots of people or to hit specific targets. The jobs are not particularly well paid, any more than the front line users of their products, but there's stiff competition for employment in both sectors, and the professional pride in making the best gun is matched only by the professional relief of knowing that you can hit your enemy before he hits you. The Manhattan Project was staffed by volunteers, and the development of the H bomb was promoted not by politicians (who had no inkling that such a thing was possible, and weren't keen to fund it) but by scientists seeking a better kill ratio.