Electrical conductivity of atmosphere before/after "spraying"

cmnit

Member
Many chemtrailists affirm that at least one of the goal of chemtrails is to increase the electrical conductivity of the atmosphere by means of metallic additives such as aluminum and barium. In turn this conductivity should improve/focalize/reflect ELF or other em radiation coming from the (in)famous HAARP facility/es.
At least, this is what I have understood :)

Now, I am a physicist myself but a bit dusty, so maybe someone else has already calculated this: how much concentration of Al (or Ba) should stay in air so that electrical conductivity is raised up to ... (some decent figure). My educated guess is that concentrations should be ridiculously high. Air is not a liquid, where small or tiny fractions of proper additive can improve dramatically conductivity by means of ion transport (if I remember correctly o_O ).

Thanks a lot to everyone for the feedback!
 
Disclaimer: I got a B in physics 242, and that was the last time I actually did this kind of stuff. I'm piecing together what I remember and what I find on wikipedia here.

First off, according to wikipedia, the resistance of air at sea level at 20C is 1.30*10^16 to 3.30*10^16 ohm*meters.

Not many things resist electricity better than that - teflon, fused quartz, polyethylene terephthalate... There are things considered perfect insulators for practical systems that are actually more conductive than air. Oven dried wood, for example.


The only way to change the conductivity of a gas is to change the composition of the gas, and... Well, gasses are just very, very bad conductors in general until you ionize them (which is what lightning does), at which point they're suddenly very, very good conductors (air included), so you're just moving between different kinds of awful. However, that's not what chemtrails supposedly do. They add aerosols or particulates. That doesn't change the conductivity of air.

What it does do is give a series of more conductive channels, but the electricity still has to pass through air between them. Aluminum and barium are both really good conductors (2.82*10^-8 and 3.32*10^-8 respectively), but the math is a pain, so let's pretend they're both perfect conductors (0).

Now, the effect of aluminum and barium aerosol or particulate on the atmosphere's conductivity is basically how much they reduce the bolt's path to the ground - the charge will have no resistance where it passes through a particle, but will return to full resistance in the air.

Example: If you have a tesla coil 1 meter away from a target, but only enough power to create a 900 cm arc, if you could fill 10% of the air between the coil and the target with particles of our hypothetical perfect aluminum, you'd get a spark. It would be 900 cm of air arc with 100 cm passing through the aluminum particles. If I'm remembering right, whether that 900 cm is in one step or 10 steps of 90 or 100 steps of 9 or a thousand steps of 0.9, the cumulative resistance adds up the same.

This would be a pretty thick cloud of aluminum dust. Once the spark goes off I imagine you'd have a fire on your hands, maybe even a dust explosion.

If you used aluminum fibers it would be better, since their length means they will provide longer conduction. Particles and droplets basically need to fill the air, but fibers could be much more diffuse. You'd still need a lot of them, but for our tesla coil, a handful of chaffe or just shredded wires would probably do it (note: don't use an actual handful if you value counting to five on one hand).

But this then comes to the problem that actual lightning jumps thousands of meters (google tells me the average is around 5 km). Google also tells me the average thunderstorm is 16 km in dimater, meaning you need very thick chaffe in a volume on the order of 201 square kilometers up to whatever height the lighting originates from. Again, google tells me 1-2 km, meaning 200-400 cubic kilometers of chaffe deployed in densities far exceeding anti-radar use, to get maybe a 10% increase in lightning, which is less than the variation between otherwise similar storms. And that's assuming the storm is stationary, which does happen but is rare - they can move faster than the surface winds below them, some squall lines have been timed at 50-100 mph.

And statistically speaking, lightning is not that dangerous. There's a lot of things in thunderstorms that kill people - tornadoes, wind, rain, and hail all cause more property damage and deaths than lightning. Wind even causes more power outages than lightning itself.

If you want to make a storm more dangerous, this is not the way. You want to add energy, not make it easier to dissipate. More water, more heat, not more lightning. And storms are unbelievably powerful as it is. As I showed in the thread about artificial storms, we as a species simply don't have the ability to make enough power in one place to evaporate the water it takes to affect a storm.
 
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I'm sure that, as usual, the believers will opt for simple, yet false, bunk-based, pseudoscience nonsense instead of harder-to-understand REAL science.
 
Disclaimer: I got a B in physics 242, and that was the last time I actually did this kind of stuff. I'm piecing together what I remember and what I find on wikipedia here.

First off, according to wikipedia, the resistance of air at sea level at 20C is 1.30*10^16 to 3.30*10^16 ohm*meters.

Not many things resist electricity better than that - teflon, fused quartz, polyethylene terephthalate... There are things considered perfect insulators for practical systems that are actually more conductive than air. Oven dried wood, for example.


The only way to change the conductivity of a gas is to change the composition of the gas, and... Well, gasses are just very, very bad conductors in general until you ionize them (which is what lightning does), at which point they're suddenly very, very good conductors (air included), so you're just moving between different kinds of awful. However, that's not what chemtrails supposedly do. They add aerosols or particulates. That doesn't change the conductivity of air.

What it does do is give a series of more conductive channels, but the electricity still has to pass through air between them. Aluminum and barium are both really good conductors (2.82*10^-8 and 3.32*10^-8 respectively), but the math is a pain, so let's pretend they're both perfect conductors (0).

Now, the effect of aluminum and barium aerosol or particulate on the atmosphere's conductivity is basically how much they reduce the bolt's path to the ground - the charge will have no resistance where it passes through a particle, but will return to full resistance in the air.

Example: If you have a tesla coil 1 meter away from a target, but only enough power to create a 900 cm arc, if you could fill 10% of the air between the coil and the target with particles of our hypothetical perfect aluminum, you'd get a spark. It would be 900 cm of air arc with 100 cm passing through the aluminum particles. If I'm remembering right, whether that 900 cm is in one step or 10 steps of 90 or 100 steps of 9 or a thousand steps of 0.9, the cumulative resistance adds up the same.

This would be a pretty thick cloud of aluminum dust. Once the spark goes off I imagine you'd have a fire on your hands, maybe even a dust explosion.

If you used aluminum fibers it would be better, since their length means they will provide longer conduction. Particles and droplets basically need to fill the air, but fibers could be much more diffuse. You'd still need a lot of them, but for our tesla coil, a handful of chaffe or just shredded wires would probably do it (note: don't use an actual handful if you value counting to five on one hand).

But this then comes to the problem that actual lightning jumps thousands of meters (google tells me the average is around 5 km). Google also tells me the average thunderstorm is 16 km in dimater, meaning you need very thick chaffe in a volume on the order of 201 square kilometers up to whatever height the lighting originates from. Again, google tells me 1-2 km, meaning 200-400 cubic kilometers of chaffe deployed in densities far exceeding anti-radar use, to get maybe a 10% increase in lightning, which is less than the variation between otherwise similar storms. And that's assuming the storm is stationary, which does happen but is rare - they can move faster than the surface winds below them, some squall lines have been timed at 50-100 mph.

And statistically speaking, lightning is not that dangerous. There's a lot of things in thunderstorms that kill people - tornadoes, wind, rain, and hail all cause more property damage and deaths than lightning. Wind even causes more power outages than lightning itself.

If you want to make a storm more dangerous, this is not the way. You want to add energy, not make it easier to dissipate. More water, more heat, not more lightning. And storms are unbelievably powerful as it is. As I showed in the thread about artificial storms, we as a species simply don't have the ability to make enough power in one place to evaporate the water it takes to affect a storm.

So.. TLDR:

Youd basically have to fill the sky with solid blocks of aluminium and barium to increase lightning than try to spray particulate into the air? Is that about the long and short of it?
 
The former explanation is great, but wrt em wave propagation in gases with particulate I think we need some more physical considerations. After all, ionosphere is able to reflect em waves (at very long wavelengths that is very small frequencies) even if it is a very rare medium, thanks to free moving ions. Maybe paramagnetic behavior of particulate could play a role for em propagation? Chemtrailists do not refer to lightning but to em waves ranging from say microwaves to ELF. Clearly, electrical conductivity is out of question as explained brilliantly by Hevach.
 
I'll have a stab at this.

EM waves reflect off a medium (eg the ionosphere) if their frequency is lower than the plasma frequency of that medium.

This is why low-frequency ("long wave") radio signals get bounced back off the ionosphere, but high-frequency (VHF or FM band) signals don't.

Microwaves (which are a favourite buzzword of HAARP theorists) are even higher frequency than even VHF radio waves. Microwaves are not going to reflect off the ionosphere: they are far too high-frequency. Indeed, HAARP used microwaves precisely because they are absorbed by the ionosphere, exciting regions of it and making it more reflective to extremely low-frequency radio waves which can be used for communications purposes.

From Wikipedia:


The critical frequency is the limiting frequency at or below which a radio wave is reflected by an ionospheric layer at vertical incidence. If the transmitted frequency is higher than the plasma frequency of the ionosphere, then the electrons cannot respond fast enough, and they are not able to re-radiate the signal. It is calculated as shown below:


where N = electron density per m3 and fcritical is in Hz.

The Maximum Usable Frequency (MUF) is defined as the upper frequency limit that can be used for transmission between two points at a specified time.


where = angle of attack, the angle of the wave relative to the horizon, and sin is the sine function.
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Now, if you're talking about making the lower atmosphere reflective to microwaves, as per this conspiracy theory, you would need to introduce free electrons sufficient to make f(critical) equal to approximately 3GHz (the frequency used by NEXRAD weather radars!).

This would also have the side effect of making ALL radio waves with a longer wavelength than microwaves (i.e. all radio waves used for communication) reflect off the atmosphere! I think we might notice such an occurrence.


I did crunch the numbers but the calculation is too dull to put in here. To reflect NEXRAD radar you'd need about 1.7 micrograms of totally ionised aluminium per cubic metre of air, if my maths is right. Less than I was expecting, but it clearly isn't happening, as demonstrated by the fact that I can still listen to Chris Evans on Radio 2.
 
So.. TLDR:

Youd basically have to fill the sky with solid blocks of aluminium and barium to increase lightning than try to spray particulate into the air? Is that about the long and short of it?
Basically, yes. Aerosols and particulates just won't work on this scale (and I'm pretty sure they'd be just ridiculously dangerous on a manageable scale).

But, I did note that fibers could potentially manage it in a more feasible volume (and we hear a lot about fibers from chemtrailers), but it's still an incredible amount. A single 1 cm fiber, made to be fairly stiff so it would straighten when bent, would with random alignment from tumbling, give an average of .7 cm vertical distance (am I doing that trig right? that seems high). To get the 10% conduction improvement would be around 3000 of these fibers per cubic meter of air.*

Once they settle to the ground, that then translates to hundreds of thousands to millions of stiff metal bristles per square meter of ground**. And again, 10% improvement is less than the storm itself can vary. Also... bristles still have really high surface area:volume, I think they'd still ignite every time lightning passes through them, but at least no dust explosion.

This whole idea feels like trying to measure the effect of prayer. Massive, powerful, and complex forces leveraged on a cosmic scale to create changes that you then can't be sure actually happened.


*-assuming my perfect aluminum again.
**-if they are not stiff, the amount goes up since bent strands cover less average vertical distance than stiff bristles. If my math is right, and I really do not know this branch of physics so I'm trying to plug stuff into an equation I don't undertand, this should be about 12,000 strands per cubic meter, meaning tens of millions per square meter on the ground.

To reflect NEXRAD radar you'd need about 1.7 micrograms of totally ionised aluminium per cubic metre of air, if my maths is right.
Aside from the ionized part, this actually sounds like it could be feasible, at least on a localized scale. Much easier than trying to use aluminum to give lightning a conduction channel with airborn stuff.

Of course, isn't this just what chaff does anyway?
 
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The former explanation is great, but wrt em wave propagation in gases with particulate I think we need some more physical considerations. After all, ionosphere is able to reflect em waves (at very long wavelengths that is very small frequencies) even if it is a very rare medium, thanks to free moving ions. Maybe paramagnetic behavior of particulate could play a role for em propagation? Chemtrailists do not refer to lightning but to em waves ranging from say microwaves to ELF. Clearly, electrical conductivity is out of question as explained brilliantly by Hevach.

I agree with ya CM, but I wanted to try to make sure what Hevach was saying was broken down into layman's terms.. the "sciency" stuff tends to make people's minds melt which then has them go to something that "makes more sense.." which is why I broke it down Barney Style.
 
This would be a pretty thick cloud of aluminum dust. Once the spark goes off I imagine you'd have a fire on your hands, maybe even a dust explosion.
Aluminum in atomic form would oxidize violently once exposed to air.

A cubic kilometer of air with admixed stochiometric aluminum particles would rival FAT MAN and LITTLE BOY, I'm sure.

Stand back, self-lighting touch paper. Or not. But I wouldn't be at the test site. (Scuttles).
 
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Disclaimer: I got a B in physics 242, and that was the last time I actually did this kind of stuff. I'm piecing together what I remember and what I find on wikipedia here.

First off, according to wikipedia, the resistance of air at sea level at 20C is 1.30*10^16 to 3.30*10^16 ohm*meters.

Not many things resist electricity better than that - teflon, fused quartz, polyethylene terephthalate... There are things considered perfect insulators for practical systems that are actually more conductive than air. Oven dried wood, for example.


The only way to change the conductivity of a gas is to change the composition of the gas, and... Well, gasses are just very, very bad conductors in general until you ionize them (which is what lightning does), at which point they're suddenly very, very good conductors (air included), so you're just moving between different kinds of awful. However, that's not what chemtrails supposedly do. They add aerosols or particulates. That doesn't change the conductivity of air.

What it does do is give a series of more conductive channels, but the electricity still has to pass through air between them. Aluminum and barium are both really good conductors (2.82*10^-8 and 3.32*10^-8 respectively), but the math is a pain, so let's pretend they're both perfect conductors (0).

Now, the effect of aluminum and barium aerosol or particulate on the atmosphere's conductivity is basically how much they reduce the bolt's path to the ground - the charge will have no resistance where it passes through a particle, but will return to full resistance in the air.

Example: If you have a tesla coil 1 meter away from a target, but only enough power to create a 900 cm arc, if you could fill 10% of the air between the coil and the target with particles of our hypothetical perfect aluminum, you'd get a spark. It would be 900 cm of air arc with 100 cm passing through the aluminum particles. If I'm remembering right, whether that 900 cm is in one step or 10 steps of 90 or 100 steps of 9 or a thousand steps of 0.9, the cumulative resistance adds up the same.

This would be a pretty thick cloud of aluminum dust. Once the spark goes off I imagine you'd have a fire on your hands, maybe even a dust explosion.

If you used aluminum fibers it would be better, since their length means they will provide longer conduction. Particles and droplets basically need to fill the air, but fibers could be much more diffuse. You'd still need a lot of them, but for our tesla coil, a handful of chaffe or just shredded wires would probably do it (note: don't use an actual handful if you value counting to five on one hand).

But this then comes to the problem that actual lightning jumps thousands of meters (google tells me the average is around 5 km). Google also tells me the average thunderstorm is 16 km in dimater, meaning you need very thick chaffe in a volume on the order of 201 square kilometers up to whatever height the lighting originates from. Again, google tells me 1-2 km, meaning 200-400 cubic kilometers of chaffe deployed in densities far exceeding anti-radar use, to get maybe a 10% increase in lightning, which is less than the variation between otherwise similar storms. And that's assuming the storm is stationary, which does happen but is rare - they can move faster than the surface winds below them, some squall lines have been timed at 50-100 mph.

And statistically speaking, lightning is not that dangerous. There's a lot of things in thunderstorms that kill people - tornadoes, wind, rain, and hail all cause more property damage and deaths than lightning. Wind even causes more power outages than lightning itself.

If you want to make a storm more dangerous, this is not the way. You want to add energy, not make it easier to dissipate. More water, more heat, not more lightning. And storms are unbelievably powerful as it is. As I showed in the thread about artificial storms, we as a species simply don't have the ability to make enough power in one place to evaporate the water it takes to affect a storm.
I think you've overlooked a few variables here.

The shape and size of any, relatively conductive, suspended particles in air is going to throw all your numbers off. The dielectric breakdown strength of dry air, at Standard Temperature and Pressure (STP), between spherical electrodes is approximately 33 kV/cm... However, if one is to slowly stretch copper wire to the point of failure you can get an electrode to a 1 micron point. (I've done this on my van de Graaff generator) with this you can achive a dielectric breakdown of air at just under 10kv/cm @ STP and further still, Corona discharge. This represents a tripling of the conductivity of the air with only two electrodes. (I have no plans whatsoever to test conductive suspended particals with a tesla coil but perhaps the van de graaff generator.)

Have any idea on how to calculate the potential and capacitance of say a 100 cubic meter air/aluminum Capacitor at 40k feet with suspended micro or nano sized aluminum particals at a givin density? I don't. But I can say this could store a monstrous amount of energy far greater then any storm clouds.
 
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