The tech that would’ve made Back to the Future five minutes long

Potentially dangerous lightning strikes can be diverted to a safer path by beaming a high-powered laser into the sky, per a new peer-reviewed study published yesterday in Nature Photonics. Or in other, more colloquial terms – humans can now guide the power of Thor using *Dr. Evil voice* frickin’ laser beams.

⏪ Let’s start at the beginning… The concept of using laser beams as lightning rods is nothing new – scientists have been salivating over the possibility since the laser was first invented in 1960. And lightning rods could certainly use an update: the tech currently in use is modeled after Ben Franklin’s original design from the mid-1700s.

The idea behind using a laser is that short, high-power pulses from said laser can superheat the air in its path, making the particles more electrically conductive and creating a safe route for the lightning to travel into the ground. But up until now, experiments in the field had proven unsuccessful.

⛰️ Which brings us to Monday’s study: Where a team of international researchers, using a new car-sized laser lightning rod prototype assembled atop the peak of a Swiss mountain, successfully diverted four lightning bolts.

And similar to Formula 1, the key to success was just to go faster than everyone else. Per the researchers, the key breakthrough in this experiment was significantly upping the laser’s firing speed from previous attempts (by ~100x).

But also like Formula 1, it’s easy to tell things to go fast – and harder to make it happen. The laser lightning rod prototype used in the experiment cost $2.2 billion to build, and was required to fire a record 1,000 pulses per second to pull off the successful attempt.

⚡ Zoom out: Roughly 100 lightning strikes occur around the world every single second. Collectively, these cause thousands of casualties and billions of dollars in damages each year (including $1.3 billion in the US in 2021).