Okay, so a buddy of mine is convinced that the government is using HAARP to “pump up” and control hurricanes, which, of course, is impossible. I realize that it’s probably hopeless, but I’m hoping that if I can find a source which explains the power of hurricanes in the power of electrical energy, he’ll see that there’s simply no bloody way we could produce enough juice to kick a hurricane up from one category to another. So anybody know of such a cite?
A “googlewatt” is, of course, the amount of power required by an Internet search engine.
Pump up, no; that requires far more energy than we can put into a hurricane. As far as steering them goes, I have heard claims that the military has experimented/intends to experiment with creating low pressure zones by using very a powerful radio beam to push up a local area of the ionosphere. The facility was somewhere in Alask IIRC. I believe I last read about it in one of those Project Censored books, for what it’s worth.
The book was critical of the plan ( assuming it exists ); IIRC the reasons were :
If it works, the military will screw with the weather without knowing what they are doing, with unknown results.
If it doesn’t work, it’s a big waste of money.
It’s a weapon of mass destruction, and one more likely to hurt civilians than anyone else.
Producing that much radio energy is likely to screw up electronics all over Alaska; frying someone’s pacemaker in Anchorage isn’t what the military is supposed to be doing.
Anyone else not surprised that the subject of nuking hurricanes is a frequently asked question? :rolleyes:
That would be the HAARP I mentioned in the OP. Given that we can barely predict where they’re going to hit before they actually do, I find it hard to believe that we could figure out what to do to be able to move them around and enable them to hit the target of our choosing.
Well, that would make a googlewatt roughly equivalent to 13 Megawatts, if we assume that Google’s 63,272 machines are using roughly 200 watts each.
Actually, I assumed a Googlewatt would be a measure of how popular something is as determined by how many hits it gets on Google. For example, googling “cats” returns about 59,400,000 results, while googling “dogs” returns about 88,200,000. Therefore, dogs are just under 29 megagooglewatts more powerful than cats. By the way, see http://www.googlefight.com/
Seriously, though, I think you meant “gigawatt”…
Actually, I figured that the power would be well above gigawatt, and used googlewatts as a generic term (though I should have spelled it “googolwatt”, I admit).
The idea as I understand it, is that creating a low pressure zone will either create or attract storms; whether it would actually work, I’ve no idea.
That point estimate is a year and a half old. At a recent talk at my university Google hinted at more than 150,000 servers.