Is it possible to transfer data through lightning?

I know we have the huge multi gig pipelines and whatnot for data transfer. My question is mainly just a shower thought.

We have had a lot of lightning where I am lately and I wondered if it would be possible to actually store and direct lightning and transfer data.

Would it be faster and could it be done?

Fiber already transmits data at the speed of light.

The issue isnt speed, its lack of hardware to handle the speeds.

originally posted by: AScrubWhoDied
Fiber already transmits data at the speed of light.

The issue isnt speed, its lack of hardware to handle the speeds.

Not exactly....it is slower because of the path it has to travel.

I'm more thinking what if there was a start point and end point but no necessary path....the lightning itself finds the shortest path "algorithm" from a to b.

And I have no possible way to calculate this, but if lightning could hold actual data, how much data could it hold?

Max speeds achieved with fiber is 3% slower than light through a vacuum.

Also, not sure if you can "store" data in lightning.

originally posted by: AScrubWhoDied
Max speeds achieved with fiber is 3% slower than light through a vacuum.

Also, not sure if you can "store" data in lightning.

Yeah...I get the max speed but that is a ideal vacuum line that would be impossible to actually create and use for any major distance.

I am just wondering if that might had no direct path to follow but had a point a and b to travel to, would it be faster if it could?

I get it is kinda comparing apples to oranges but i had not planned to compare anything....

originally posted by: Vasa Croe

originally posted by: AScrubWhoDied
Max speeds achieved with fiber is 3% slower than light through a vacuum.

Also, not sure if you can "store" data in lightning.

Yeah...I get the max speed but that is a ideal vacuum line that would be impossible to actually create and use for any major distance.

I am just wondering if that might had no direct path to follow but had a point a and b to travel to, would it be faster if it could?

I get it is kinda comparing apples to oranges but i had not planned to compare anything....

I wouldnt think so as lightning itself doesnt move anywhere near the speed of light.

Gotta consider the visual effect you see is a by product of lightning and not the lightning itself.


Oh, that was worded poorly, the light that's emitted from lightning travels faster than the charged particles do.

a reply to: Vasa Croe

I have no scientific expertise to base this on, but I believe lightning itself "is" or "contains" data in the form of electrical charge. It would be a matter of organizing said data into bits of measurable differentiation.

So...yeah, I don't know, but interesting thought provoker

a reply to: Vasa Croe

i'm kinda reaching back here a few years, might be wrong. but isn't that what wireless communication is? i think it is. isn't it called WPT, wireless power transfer , ,WET, wireless power transmission.
first proposed by Telsa.

one thing comes to mind, well two. one is now with WPT or WET injury can be a real danger to people and animals from electromagnetic fields. and the second i would think with the voltage and current that lighting has at discharge i think it would be 100 more lethal.

as ready posted it would take some heavy heavy duty equipment to handle it.




ETA: here is part of a abstract for wireless communication. warning if you go to the link and want to read the whole thing it's a PDF.

Nikola Tesla is referred to as “Father of wireless”. He first proposed the concept wireless power transmission and demonstrated “the transmission of electrical energy without wires”, which depends electrical conductivity. A team of PHYSICS research group, led by Professor Marin soljacic, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated wireless powering of 60 W light bulb with 40% efficiency at a two meter distance using two sixty centimeter diameter coils in 2007. The team experimentally demonstrates wireless power transfer, potentially useful for powering laptops cell phones without any cords. The merit of WPT is that always power is available. The power failure due to short circuit and fault on cables would never exist in the transmission and power theft would be impossible. The demerit of the concept is interference of microwave with present communication systems. The main application of WPT is to transmit the power as Solar Power Satellites (SPS).

Wireless communication is the transmission of the sound energy over a very long distance without any type of wires or cables. Wireless power transmission is the transformation of electrical energy into electrical load. With the development of highly reliable, miniature, solid state radio frequency hardware in the 1970, the wireless communication era came into existence. First of all, W. C. Brown developed a rectenna (rectifying antenna) for receiving and rectifying microwaves. With the rectenna he succeeded in MPT experiments to wire helicopter and to free flied helicopter. The largest application of the WPT through microwave is a space “Solar Power Satellite” (SPS). The most common form of wireless power transmission is resonant magnetic induction and electromagnetic radiation. The difference between the WPT and communication systems is only efficiency.
APPLICATIONS OF WIRELESS POWER TRANSMISSION (WPT)

A dc, direct current, or low frequency ac, alternating current, signal in a wire will outrun a signal in a vacuum, radio or light, by about 30% by the velocity factor involved in the wire. The signal is not traveling as far in the copper because it is bouncing from outer shell electron to the next outer shell electron in the next atom. The travel time across each atom is instantaneous because an electron in one side force one out the other side at the same time.

Visible lightning is not faster then the speed of light.

Lightning can be controlled somewhat by shooting a fine wire, attached to the ground, into the air with a rocket. This triggers lightning but only when thunderstorms are very nearby and a charge has built up.

Storing information or sending information I don’t see as a possibility as atmospheric lightning is not that controllable.

Now then, generating small controlled lightning signals has been done for over a hundred years. It is called radio. Look up spark gap transmitter. It is just applying a voltage between a wire and ground in a way that turns on and off quickly with some signal variation for the information, transmitted, and then received by a detector that makes this into some form of useful signal in a way that duplicates the signal being sent. This is limited to the speed of light in a vacuum as there is no conductive link between the transmitter and receiver.

Does this help?

a reply to: Vasa Croe

There's no reason why you couldn't except that we can probably transmit more data faster and with less cost by using mundane methods.

I imagine that if you had something that could modulate the potential difference, and simply bridged some of the distance between the negatively charged clouds and positively charged ground, that you would be able to modulate the lightning to carry information.

The modulating bridge would not even have to be in the clouds, it could be on the ground side and would modulate the whole current path.

lightning isn't really a Thing that can be stored and modified and used at will, it's more like a process.
The result of buildup of differently charged zones of energy in a given area, and the discharge when they equalise.
It's also extremely dangerous, especially to any sort of organised system of the type you'd need to receive data.

nice mental image but i'm thinking very no.

a reply to: beyondknowledge

Awesome....yeah when I was trying to find info on what I was thinking, the spark gap radio came up...thanks!

It would be way too chaotic to send data through lightning. It would be hard to direct the flow properly and any dust in the air would change the signals in the bolt It doesn't flow in a nice straight path, it is chaotic.

Lightning is simply highly charged visible electricity. I believe attempts to store the voltage output of lightning strike have resulted in damage due to lack of capacity. Like how do you store all that sudden electricity burst without blowing out everything connected nearby.

a reply to: Vasa Croe

Good question. Reminded me of the book Lightning by Dean Koontz.

There are lots of good ideas but as someone else stated in some cases the tech is not quite there yet or is in development.

You dont store it the lightning....you store it in the cloud.
😆



a reply to: AScrubWhoDied

A lightning bolt is very slow compared to wire/radio transmission, which happen pretty much at speed of light. The initial discharge travels at about 60 km/s, the return stroke is faster reaching up to 1/3 speed of light.

The elctromagnetic field (the flash) of the lightning travels at speed of light though. So I gues lightning could be used as a kind of light/radio communication system if one had an efficient/safe way to create lightnings?

originally posted by: Vasa Croe

originally posted by: AScrubWhoDied
Fiber already transmits data at the speed of light.

The issue isnt speed, its lack of hardware to handle the speeds.

Not exactly....it is slower because of the path it has to travel.

I'm more thinking what if there was a start point and end point but no necessary path....the lightning itself finds the shortest path "algorithm" from a to b.

Lightning doesn't find the shortest path; the shortest path would not be jagged like lightning. The shortest path to the ground would be a straight line.

What lightning does is follow the path of least resistance. The lightning is being conducted through the atmosphere, but since the atmosphere is not uniform and homogenous, its conductivity varies. The lightning travels along a path through the more conductive parts of the atmosphere, creating the jagged -- and longer -- path to the ground.

a reply to: beyondknowledge

Quite a nifty way to harvest energy, all the same, considering a single bolt of lightning carries a relatively large amount of electrical power, approximately 5 Gigajoules.

And there are areas of the Earth that experience electrical and thunderstorms more nights of the year than not.

Need to be quite the bottle all the same to hold that kind of load. LoL