my way to "stop" tsunamis...will it work???

okay...

this is going to be hard to explain but i will try...

plot: a tsunami just came about and it is heading toward the east coast of the US...

a space satellite then shoots a beam wide enough and long enough to touch the whole tsunami and makes the entire tsunami POSITIVELY charged...

another satellite then makes a "laser wall" of POSITIVELY charged particles right off the eastern coast of the US...

the POSITIVE tsunami hits the POSITIVE "laser wall" and the tsunami "bounces off" and "collapses" because of the collision...

the east coast is saved!!!

will my idea work???

please explain why or why not...

IMHO no it would not work.
There is no way to differentiate the water that is moving in the shock wave with the rest of the surrounding water. If you positively charge the water, it is just going to dissipate out from the target point. This would be the same thing that occurs when lightning strikes the ocean.


edit to add
In addition, it is a shock wave; it increases in diameter as it travels from the epicenter outward. I cannot imagine an earth based power plant having enough power to do something like this, let alone a satellite.

[edit on 1/13/2005 by defcon5]

Originally posted by defcon5
IMHO no it would not work.
There is no way to differentiate the water that is moving in the shock wave with the rest of the surrounding water. If you positively charge the water, it is just going to dissipate out from the target point. This would be the same thing that occurs when lightning strikes the ocean.

sry but i don't know what you are talking about...

can you explain please???

thanks...

Water is a conductor, right?
If you threw an electric cord in your swimming pool, would you be able to keep the electricity only in the shallow end of the pool?
Not that I want you to try, mind you.
So how would you charge the wave only?
If you cannot control this, then the charge would dissipate out into the ocean.

Originally posted by defcon5
Water is a conductor, right?
If you threw an electric cord in your swimming pool, would you be able to keep the electricity only in the shallow end of the pool?
Not that I want you to try, mind you.

So how would you charge the wave only?
If you cannot control this, then the charge would dissipate out into the ocean.

okay...

so how about if the first satellite made a positive "laser beam" and shot it at the wave and it "covered" the wave and the "beam" followed on the tsunami until it collided with the positive wall...

would it work now???

My background is strictly from an electronics perspective; the problems I can see are this:

1) Finding a way to isolate the sea water that is traveling with the shock wave from the rest of the water
2) Having a power source powerful enough to electrify something that is going to increase in area until it covers thousands of miles
3) Loss of energy due to dissipation to the surround water, even if the laser tracked the moving shockwave and continued to pump out electricity into it.

I am sure there are other aspects to it as well, such as the salinity of the water, that must be taken into account. You would have to find a laser and physics expert to answer the rest of your questions, I am not qualified enough in the field of lasers or physics to answer the rest.
I am not sure if this, “force field”, that you are proposing could stop the amount of physical energy involved in a tsunami. It seems to me from what I recall in basic physics that it would take an equal amount of force to stop the force of the shockwave, but I don’t have a clue how much force that this would require, nor how you would generate that much power.

Originally posted by defcon5
My background is strictly from an electronics perspective; the problems I can see are this:

1) Finding a way to isolate the sea water that is traveling with the shock wave from the rest of the water
2) Having a power source powerful enough to electrify something that is going to increase in area until it covers thousands of miles
3) Loss of energy due to dissipation to the surround water, even if the laser tracked the moving shockwave and continued to pump out electricity into it.

I am sure there are other aspects to it as well, such as the salinity of the water, that must be taken into account. You would have to find a laser and physics expert to answer the rest of your questions, I am not qualified enough in the field of lasers or physics to answer the rest.
I am not sure if this, “force field”, that you are proposing could stop the amount of physical energy involved in a tsunami. It seems to me from what I recall in basic physics that it would take an equal amount of force to stop the force of the shockwave, but I don’t have a clue how much force that this would require, nor how you would generate that much power.

thank you...

i will ask my physics teacher tomorow (i am in 11th grade BTW)...

It could never work at all with lasers or electricity, it would be bad for people looking at it, they would go blind and the sea life would die.

The best thing to do is use molded blocks of cement with a checkerboard pattern of raised blocks that dampen and reflect some of the surge OR just use a 1 story wall with some holes in it.
However no one will go out of thier way for something if they don't expect it, its not like we are making every city bio weapon proof or even educating people about radiation pills. It's not like you wear a bullet proof vest and gas mask all the time for the same reason they don't have protection from this sort of thing.
We could be making lots of wind generators but people don't like to look at them. Fashion over function.

TSA

Nice idea but your idea would cost millions of dollars to construct an early warning system at the moment is th only way to save lives from a Tsunami.

Other thing to consider about tsunami is that the body of water that is moving stretches from the ocean botom to the top and the wave rises near coastal water.

To stop a body of water that stretches up to 5 miles down and in case of a mega stunami 1000's of miles wide, there is nothing on this planet that can ever stop this kind of force.

Personally I was thinking of diverting a tsunami at underwater near the source rather than at the coast, for the mere fact that the initial landslide can be of a width of say 20 km, while the generated waves can attack a coastal line of thousands of kilometres as we have seen, from an economic perspective, it would make sense to build large or smart structures to safeguard the 20 km landslide area than to protect thousands of kilometres coastline....

How about concrete semicircular walls on the seabottom in front of an expected landslide and thereby create passagelanes for the tsunami wich will be gradually bend to be diverted towards the direction of antarctica instead of the american coasts (or maybe venezuela if you really don't like Chavez)

I'd say, don't interfere with Mother natures inner workings and just learn to read nature's signs again.

The only thing building things to stop mother nature from doing her thing is pospone disaster and when it finaly happens after being held back by human intervention, it'll be a 1000 times worse then when we would've just learned to live with it.

1) Finding a way to isolate the sea water that is traveling with the shock wave from the rest of the water

In a waveform in the sea, the water itself isn't actually travelling anywhere. It is the wave itself that is travelling through the medium, which in this case is Sea water.

The effect of the receding water and the subsequent wave crest is in fact the wave manifesting itself in the medium, and the actual water itself does not travel that far at all.

On the whole, this idea will not work.

What may work, however, and if it was technically possible at present, is a giant wave generator.

If you can send a wave back at the Tsunami as it approcahed, timed it perfectly and used a harmonic frequency to that of the tsunami wave, then you could in effect cancel it out.

But......it can't be done as the energy required would be astronomical compared to our current total power output at present.

EDIT for spelling

[edit on 14/1/05 by stumason]

couldn't you detonate some bombs underwater to send a wave at it? sure it would be bad for the surrounding environment, but we have been doing it for so long now. or maybe even time the detonation of bombs right as the wave reaches the areas of where the bombs were planted?

Tahlen

Originally posted by Countermeasures
How about concrete semicircular walls on the seabottom in front of an expected landslide and thereby create passagelanes for the tsunami wich will be gradually bend to be diverted towards the direction of antarctica instead of the american coasts (or maybe venezuela if you really don't like Chavez

)

It might be little hard to build walls to ocean around every subduction zone... neither talking about how big force they would have to withstand.


And if energy of wave can't spread to wider area it's strength doesn't really decrease (or does it extremely slowly) causing it to just bounce back from Antarctica.

[edit on 14-1-2005 by E_T]

man vs nature.....

we can't win.


move to higher ground

Originally posted by thematrix
Other thing to consider about tsunami is that the body of water that is moving stretches from the ocean botom to the top and the wave rises near coastal water.

To stop a body of water that stretches up to 5 miles down and in case of a mega stunami 1000's of miles wide, there is nothing on this planet that can ever stop this kind of force.

just as a joke:

the satellites are in space not on earth

drunk: thank you for the "nice idea" comment...

it would cost money but, if it works, it would be worth it...

No harm done by posting an idea. You would have to monitor all these areas of potential Tsunamis for one thing. Tsunami's can move very quickly, not sure how you would counter the wave. The wave could be enormous and cover a lot of area. I guess the best defense for right now is to evacuate, untill there is some sort of counter action measures that would work.

Troy

They See ALL, I hate to sound mean, but, well . . . .

How is a laser supposed to "charge" anything?

And, as previously stated, the water in a wave does not move anymore than a few feet.

A surface wave:



[edit on 15-1-2005 by HowardRoark]

A powerful laser can ionize the air and make a path for high voltage, but it still would spread out as soon as it hits the water and wouldn't do anything but kill fish.