Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

livescience.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 57 posts

Re: Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

#41

Post by bdunbar »

kapuhy wrote: post #18

Hurricanes would not be a problem if you Americans really understood fairytale about three pigs and bad wolf and start to build your houses from bricks instead of paper. Then you would need to just ensure that you have full fridge of food and a lot of books to read, no need to evacuate.

"and start to build your houses from bricks instead of paper"

Funny - I was thinking about my service in Okinawa, years ago. You know how in Karate Kid 2 they had paper houses because 'Japan'? Not so much.

Homes in Okinawa are built of cinderblocks and concrete with flat roofs because they get typhoons on a regular basis. So regular that 'typhoons' are how they replenish their water supply.

I suspect that one reason more homes in the US are not built like hurricane bunkers is that for any given locale in 'hurricane' range the odds of having an actual hurricane blow over are not 'will happen' but 'may happen'.

Think of it this way: every single home in the US within X miles of the coast from Maine to Texas would have to be 'hurricane' proof. That's a lot of construction.

Re: Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

#42

Post by padobson »

I haven't read anything here about the environmental effects of stopping hurricanes. Yes, it sucks that they show up and flood our cities and destory our houses, but they are definitely a common part of the carribean ecosystem.

It seems imprudent to try and stop them without considering this. Who knows what kinds of disasters we'd be trading for hurricanes - regardless of the technology we use to stop them.

Re: Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

#43

Post by [deleted] »

ck2 wrote: post #16

It's funny how even if you could do this (and thank goodness you cannot) people would be for it, but shutting down coal plants to possibly reduce frequency and energy level of hurricanes, nah that's too much inconvenience. Radioactive hurricane, much less hassle.

[deleted]

Re: Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

#44

Post by scrumper »

guylhem wrote: post #33
scrumper wrote: post #12

Human ingenuity is quite good at delivering enormous amounts of energy over a very short time. Nature deploys merely huge energies, but does so for very long periods. She wins, every single time.

Nature wins until we manage to get better models and find ways to leverage so that we won't even have to deliver an enormous amount of energy but just the right amount at the right moment in the right place. We created dams, removed marshes, harnassed hydraulic power, etc - feats unbelievable hundreds of years before. And before us, Romans did also uncredible feats - such as the aqueducts. We keep on improving. Natur…

And dams burst, reclaimed marshes flood, aqueducts collapse. We can carve out a tenuous effect but it'll only last as long as we expend energy to maintain it.

> If we haven't bothered to fix something yet, maybe it's because the problem is not so important.

This is rather callous. The catastrophic tsunami in Japan was a problem of some importance, yet with all our art we could barely predict its arrival, much less affect it.

Your first sentence makes a good point - the 'three rights.' So, can you name an example where the directed application of energy has affected - in a predictable fashion - some natural process of the scale of a hurricane? Earthquakes, climate change, tsunami, storms... Not much of a track record as far as I can see. (Cloud seeding, perhaps? Hardly predictable.)

I think your faith in humanity's power is premature at best, more likely misplaced.

> Nature more or less remains the same. The end result seems quite clear to me.

> ...or wait until we have the technology to achieve it.

Nature might well remain the same, but it's still hardly within our comprehension. The end result you're talking about, that mastery of nature, would appear to be many thousands of years in the future if we ever achieve it.

Re: Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

#46

Post by mchouza »

scrumper wrote: post #39
pavel_lishin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> *Ploughshares was an exploration of peaceful uses of nuclear explosives. Turns out they're only really good at digging really gigantic holes that you can't use for 50,000 years. Seems like it might be handy for moving asteroids around, too.

Not so much. There's nothing out there in space for the explosion to push against. You could break them apart, maybe. You could pad the bomb with propellant mass but that won't really work in the case of an asteroid. (It's extremely difficult to direct the energy while capturing enough of it to be useful, so you need small bombs and lots of them. Then you have the ablation problem on the surface of the pushee - ie th…

The basic idea is to ablate the asteroid to deflect it: https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/343984.pdf http://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lare...

Re: Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

#47

Post by bitwize »

guylhem wrote: post #33
scrumper wrote: post #12

Human ingenuity is quite good at delivering enormous amounts of energy over a very short time. Nature deploys merely huge energies, but does so for very long periods. She wins, every single time.

Nature wins until we manage to get better models and find ways to leverage so that we won't even have to deliver an enormous amount of energy but just the right amount at the right moment in the right place. We created dams, removed marshes, harnassed hydraulic power, etc - feats unbelievable hundreds of years before. And before us, Romans did also uncredible feats - such as the aqueducts. We keep on improving. Natur…

If we ever get to the point where the dominant culture truly wins over nature, we're looking a mass extinction event that will make the dinosaur extinction of the late Cretaceous seem like -- well, a fart in a hurricane.

Re: Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

#48

Post by bitwize »

kapuhy wrote: post #18

Hurricanes would not be a problem if you Americans really understood fairytale about three pigs and bad wolf and start to build your houses from bricks instead of paper. Then you would need to just ensure that you have full fridge of food and a lot of books to read, no need to evacuate.

A flooded house is difficult to live in, even a flooded brick house. The calls for mandatory evac were made because of coastal flooding.

I'm to understand that very few tropical cyclones reach inland Europe; if you're European, I doubt that you understand what it's like. Why don't you spend a few years living in coastal Florida, and see how your snark holds up after surviving a few of these storms?

Re: Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

#49

Post by noiv »

anewguy wrote: post #31
ck2 wrote: post #16

It's funny how even if you could do this (and thank goodness you cannot) people would be for it, but shutting down coal plants to possibly reduce frequency and energy level of hurricanes, nah that's too much inconvenience. Radioactive hurricane, much less hassle.

What is the evidence that this is true? How much would it cost? (Coal provides ~30% of US electric power. It's not a trivial inconvenience to shut that down) As I recall, environmentalists went all doom-and-gloom after hurricane Katrina, and that was followed by many years of below average hurricane activity. How many hurricanes per year could we prevent by spending, say, 10% of our GDP on carbon reduction? How many…

> How many more hurricanes occur today than 100 years ago?

Rhetorical question. It's not about the amount of hurricanes, but their strength and their path. Apparently Sandy was blocked by an anti-cyclone south of Greenland and instead of turning right it turned sharply left and made landfall. These highs are linked by latest research to the loss of ice in the Arctic. And connecting higher ocean temperature with more powerful hurricanes is trivial.

So, it is not about preventing hurricanes it is about preventing damage and victims and keeping the infrastructure functional. In this context you can easily justify closing fossil power plants.

Re: Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

#50

Post by jlgreco »

joevandyk wrote: post #37
dhugiaskmak wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year the first weekend of the Men's NCAA Basketball tournament is projected to cost billions of dollars in lost productivity to the US economy. Would you consider nuking all of the 8 first-round sites to prevent that loss?

Damage is a bit different than lost productivity.

I think that is a matter of perspective. If you phrase the damage done by a storm in terms of dollars (as opposed to, say, lives lost...), then I think that opens the door for comparisons to other things that destroy wealth.
Post reply on HN