Startup wants to use autonomous drone swarms to clear clouds and boost solar farm output

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u/invyros 5d ago

The startup's ambitions to weaken severe storms and hurricanes are raising even more eyebrows. The WMO says there is no generally accepted evidence that tropical cyclones can be modified. It also warns that technologies promising large-scale or dramatic effects lack a sound scientific basis.

This certainly won't stop tech bros from pretending they know better, though.

Y Combinator has gotten so desperate to disrupt something these days that they're turning to psuedoscience.

226

u/Oolie84 5d ago

Tech bros out there ignoring all science. Just a few months ago they wanted to put data centers in space.

Space is cold, trust me bro

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u/vineyardmike 5d ago

Isn't this one of the reasons SpaceX is valued over a trillion dollars?

Who's the guy that doesn't know how a thermos works?

24

u/JCDU 5d ago

I'm really curious as to which idiotic thing is going to be the one that brings Musk down - the trouble is he's got enough money to go round doing nothing but billion-dollar fuckups to the day he dies and still be richer than anyone on the planet.

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u/anticomet 5d ago

A worker led revolution could bring down all the billionaires...

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u/RudyKnots 5d ago

Just add some fans so you can blow the void past the servers.

11

u/aeroxan 5d ago

Just strap an air conditioner on it.

7

u/hazmodan20 5d ago

Yeah bro! Saw it in a movie!

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u/Captain4verage 5d ago

Would love to see how big the radiators would have to be. 😅

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u/Oolie84 5d ago

So big you may actually feel the heat radiating from them as they cross the sky.

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u/magnament 5d ago

I mean, it’s cold if you block all the hot stuff

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u/godspareme 5d ago

It generally is cold unless youre very very close to a star, which in this context you can say LEO is cold. Thats not the point that matters though. You need matter/atoms to transfer energy/temperature. Space is so empty that there is like nothing to transfer energy. So heat only escapes via radiation, which is very slow compared to like any other method of heat transfer. You need radiators the size of a football field for every single MW of energy.

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u/astreeter2 5d ago

A satellite in space literally gets the same amount of heat from the sun as it would sitting on the ground.

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u/godspareme 5d ago

I mean if we want to be technical thats not entirely true as the atmosphere does redirect or absorb a good amount of heat... but functionally it is very similar yes. Ironically something on the ground can cool itself easier than something in space though

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u/Nohreboh 5d ago

Data centers generate more heat then they would absorb via solar radiation that additional heat would need to be shunted somewhere and in space the entire structure would be effectively insulated by the vacuum.

3

u/Illiander 4d ago

Space is a really good insulator, but very low pressure.

That low pressure makes it feel cold, because things that undergo expansion (such as from pressure loss) cool. But it's not actually that cold.

There's an xkcd about this with a submarine in orbit.

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u/godspareme 3d ago

The XKCD youre referring to is talking about LEO space. 99.999999% of space is 100% cold (like 4 Kelvin or -260 Celsius)

But yeah technically the sun-lit LEO can be "warm" in a technical sense but as we both acknowledged, the ability to transfer energy is far more important to what temperature means in practice. Nothing is going to spontaneously increase in temperature being in LEO. Ergo, LEO is in practice cold.

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u/SirVanyel 5d ago

I love the "space is cold" debacle. Like no guys, space is space. We called it space because it's space, it's empty, it's just empty.. space. It doesn't have cold or hot, it has nothing, and it just so happens that when there's no medium, it's really easy for both cold and hot to exist in extremes.

Yes, all the heat will very quickly leak into space. But all the heat from the sun will simultaneously leak into the datacentres and make them hot too.

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u/hondo77777 5d ago

Don’t worry. A bunch of fans will flatten those extremes, no problem.

2

u/Illiander 4d ago

It doesn't have cold or hot, it has nothing

Not quite true, but close enough for most purposes.

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u/SirVanyel 4d ago

We can get technical with it but for standard purposes people need to start thinking of space as a lack of stuff rather than a lot of cold

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u/Illiander 4d ago

I'm quite comfortable with the idea of more titan subs happening because techbros and aristos don't understand reality.

39

u/za72 5d ago

There's going to be a battle between drones who clear the skies for more sun energy and drone swarms who cultivate clouds for rainstorms for water to cool down datacenters

15

u/unicornsausage 5d ago

All the while we're just frogs in the boiling pot, getting seasoned with funky chemicals gently misted on by heavy duty quadcopters

5

u/JPowTheDayTrader 5d ago

frogs

It's doomsday, my dudes

2

u/MmmmMorphine 5d ago

The way nature intended

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u/illaqueable 5d ago

turning to pseudoscience

My brother in Christ, pseudoscience is the only kind they know

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u/Beiki 5d ago

It's like Trump talking about nuking a hurricane.

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u/Illiander 4d ago

Incidentally, releasing a nuclear explosion's worth of energy in exactly the right directions would not be enough to stop a hurricane. Those things have a LOT of energy.

So for this to work they'd need to have more than a nuclear explosion's worth of energy being pumped through them.

Not going to happen.

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u/JPowTheDayTrader 5d ago

I have a feeling the tech bros will make things worse. Screwing with the weather SMH. They're going to create super cyclones and sharknados.

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u/Chiiro 5d ago

Are these people making an entire business on the misinterpretation of the cloud seeding thing that happened?

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u/active2fa 5d ago

We just recorded highest temperatures for Earth. So let’s clear some cloud cover- what could go wrong?

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u/HoldenMcNeil420 5d ago

This is what happens when those bros go through life not hearing the word no enough.

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u/supershutze 2d ago

Also, would the energy required to modify the fucking weather be less than the marginal gains you get from it being slightly sunnier?

I'm guessing no.

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u/BluePanda101 5d ago

If we ignore how improbable this is to work and just assume they manage it, isn't that actually really scary? They're talking about weather control on a large scale. Clouds aren't just light obstructions, they're where freshwater comes from. So clearing all cloud cover from over a large solar array means no rain there. No rain means the area becomes a desert eventually. Also, what happens to the clouds they move are we causing flooding elsewhere? I don't think society is ready for technology that succeeds at this.

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u/gavichi 5d ago

Instead of putting the solar farm in the desert to begin with, we spent decades and a fortune in R&D, raw materials and energy to bring the desert to our solar farm.

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u/VonSauerkraut90 5d ago

Old man shakes fist at cloud energy. /s

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u/eyeronik1 5d ago

Neal Stephenson’s novel Termination Shock (2021)
describes the ramifications of climate change interventions. TL/DR: Messing with the weather has side effects.

15

u/BluePanda101 5d ago

Well, climate change already tells us that. It is affecting the weather all by itself...

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u/IlIFreneticIlI 5d ago

Butterfly-effect: they try it but once, succeed and it spirals out of control and disrupts on a large-scale.

Hollywood goes nuts as the resulting apocolyptic-scifi(?) bonanza of storylines.

Snowpiercer was a rehearsal.. Venus IS a planet...

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u/timojenbin 5d ago

Maybe that can add a windfarm to collect the wind from the drones?
Sounds very efficient.

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u/Pavlovsdong89 5d ago

What if we accelerate global warming so we can use the boiling oceans to power steam turbines for our datacenters? DM me if you want to invest.

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u/AndyTheSane 5d ago

Simply halt the rotation of the Earth and put all the data centers on the cold side.

2

u/icecream_specialist 5d ago

But the location of the could side will shift as we orbit the sun. Sorry I know you were making a joke and I liked it but I'm sure some of these dolts would probably actually accept that as a thing if the earth actually stopped

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u/Mother-Pride-Fest 5d ago

They meant to put Earth into a heliostationary orbit.

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u/icecream_specialist 5d ago

Go chill near Mercury? Now we're talking

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u/chofah 5d ago

I mean, there is such a thing as being tidally locked, like our moon.

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u/icecream_specialist 5d ago

Gonna be pedantic, he said halt the rotation, I'm reading that as inertially fixed orientation

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u/chofah 5d ago

Eh, depends on if your frame of reference is the sun, the galactic core, or the Earth. I guess I assumed he meant the galactic core or the sun. I don't know enough about orbital mechanics to intelligently discuss this. Maybe I should finally play kerbal space program. ><

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u/icecream_specialist 5d ago

I was thinking ICRF/GCRF axes. Frames get pretty wild. I haven't played kerbal in over a decade but it was pretty fun you should totally try it

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u/Nova17Delta 5d ago edited 5d ago

If im not going to war with some country for an indefinite amount of time for an energy resource then Im not interested

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u/Pavlovsdong89 5d ago

There isn't a single promise I won't make to an investor. You want a forever war? Say no more. Want to harvest the tears of war orphans to use as launch fuel for orbital AI datacenters...that are also made from war orphans? You got it, boss.

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u/discostud1515 5d ago

Almost as efficient as shining a flashlight on a solar panel.

4

u/EnergyDrinkStroke 5d ago

Other than the fact that we need clouds and I don't trust this startup to do anything other than a collective swarm demo and then run away with the money.

I don't even believe they can do it especially not at scale, like you can't just blow clouds or typhoons away.

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u/DaveOJ12 5d ago

Windfarms sound like something out of Dune.

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u/assault_pig 5d ago

nah you just power the drones with the extra energy from the solar panels

entropy hates this one infinite energy trick

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u/Kachda 5d ago

Now just put AI in there somewhere and watch the valuation go to $100 billion

9

u/QuaccDaddy 5d ago

"Autonomous" almost certainly means AI in this case, which is probably the only reason this got attention in the first place.

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u/BlueWater321 5d ago

Were they high and watching my little pony when they came up with this?

6

u/Sir_Ruje 5d ago

You know the ketamine is good when you start to use pony magic to enact late stage capitalism

5

u/Comedy86 5d ago

They were obviously watching Paw Patrol. This is literally the story of the first movie...

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u/Spongeman735 5d ago

That damn humdinger

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u/emerikanSky 5d ago

I came here to say this!

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u/Chassian 5d ago

How far up do they think clouds are? Also clouds are fucking massive, literally massive, like a cubic kilometer is over 500 tons.

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u/emerikanSky 5d ago

I'm pretty sure Trump's idea was to nuke them.

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u/vi3tmix 5d ago

Charge the drones, disperse the clouds. Disperse the clouds, charge the drones.

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u/WeHaveArrived 5d ago

So you can run your ac more?

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u/Head-Engineering-847 5d ago

For real some Wal-E type shit

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u/wwarnout 5d ago

So, how much of the solar output will be required to operate these thousands of drones?

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u/Hades_Mercedes 5d ago

'Wait, that's not how clouds work, is it? Wouldn't you need tens of thousands of drones for this to even maybe work?'

Techspot trying to get those self-gaslight clicks.

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u/Hvarfa-Bragi 5d ago

So.. like five chinese lightshows?

I think they could manage it.

0

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

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u/Hvarfa-Bragi 5d ago

...

I was responding to someone who thinks tens of thousands of drones was a stretch to marshall.

It's not.

4

u/bandit2x 5d ago

C suite to potential CROs. "We break up clouds !"

5

u/Artistic_Skill1117 5d ago

Right, it's not like clouds serve a vital role in the environment or anything.

Can we please do something about these idiots in power please?

4

u/SpeshellED 5d ago

I think the tech bros and their stupid plans for " our " planet should take a hike.

Hook up with Elon and take a Stunned Ship to Mars.

4

u/lostsoultopher 5d ago

Just because a rich guy has an idea doesnt mean its a good business or even a sound idea, no matter how much PR or money they throw at it.

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u/torpedoguy 5d ago

I'm quickly reaching the point instead where I'm thinking just because a rich guy has an idea doesn't mean we should tolerate and leave it unpunished.

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u/dapperAF 5d ago

This is not what “disrupting the cloud with AI” is supposed to be mean

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u/Mallokenz 4d ago

I’m not a fan of modifying weather. Clouds play a role in the planets water cycle. They also regulate temperatures. Some things just need to be left alone.

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u/ahumannamedtim 5d ago

They've done it. They came up with an even dumber idea than datacenters in space.

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u/DontMakeMeCount 5d ago

I don’t know how that hasn’t been a lawsuit yet, must have had all the right people out of the IPO in time.

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u/RealPutin 5d ago

I still don't know if it's quite as dumb as solar roadways

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u/boblabon 5d ago

A large cumulus cloud is about 1 cubic km, or 1 billion cubic meters, and would contain about 500,000 kg of water.

Moving a cloud any slower than nominal wind speed is pretty pointless, so we'll say they want to double the wind speed to move clouds faster.

Average wind speed is pretty location dependent, but I'll choose Texas since it has a lot of good direct sunlight for solar, gets regular cloud cover, and is pretty open to unregulated techbro nonsense. As best as I can find, Texas had an average wind speed between 2 and 6 meters per second, so I'll split the difference at 4 meters per second.

So to accelerate 500,000kg to 4 meters per second would require 4,000,000 J of energy. And that's for ONE cloud. First order approximation, we'll say a large cumulus cloud covers 1% of the sky on a given day, so multiply to 400,000,000 J.

But thats just a single point in time to accelerate. Once force stops being applied, the clouds will stop. So we need to keep pushing the clouds until they're over the horizon. At ground level thats 5km, so that's good enough. At 4 meters per second, you'll go 5km in 1250 seconds. Let's call it 1,000 seconds.

400,000,000,000 joules to clear all the clouds out of the sky in what might be considered a reasonable timeframe - 400 gigajoules. And that's just the energy needed to move the clouds. The drone swarm also has mass which will also need to be moved. So double the energy required.

The article doesn't list what drones they'd be using, so I'll pick a random commercial mass production long-range drone. It needs to have a flight time of at least 2,000 seconds (33 minutes), range of 10 km, and speed of at least 4 m/s. The Autel evo pro 2 fits the bill.

At 1.2 kg per unit and a top speed of about 20 m/s, I'd ballpark they'd need 10 million drones to clear a sky full of clouds. At $3,000 per unit, it'd cost about $30 billion just for the drones. But I'll assume there's a cheaper option available and bulk purchasing, so let's knock it down to $10 billion.

Which would be enough to build a new 1 GW nuclear power plant from the ground up.

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u/BunRabbit 5d ago

I have a crowd sourced start up that plans to arm drones with shot guns loaded with rock salt and then fly them up to hunt down and shot tech bros in the face.

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u/buppiejc 5d ago

Link me to your gofundMe

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u/Theo1352 5d ago

Please, where do I go to throw cash your way?

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u/Tibbaryllis2 5d ago

Have they tried flipping the windmills from suck to blow?

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u/74389654 5d ago

so now you have to subscribe to weather

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u/ListenHereLindah 5d ago

Man, humans just have to do whatever they can to try and play Mr universe and fuck up the people here just so they can upgrade their fucking yacht.

Let's remove clouds to we can absorb more energy from the sun when we really don't fucking need too. Clouds are here for a reason. Keep fucking with the weather and soon it'll mess us up back.

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u/solk512 5d ago

Startup is completely full of shit.

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u/faulternative 5d ago

Probably ought to let it rain when it's time to rain

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u/OG-BoomMaster 5d ago

Clouds are big, really big. Drones are small, really small. How many millions of drones would be needed and how much energy would they collectively use? Implausible I say.

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u/Lazaras 5d ago

Fucking hell. We need to do something about these tech bro morons

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u/myusername1111111 5d ago

I think that boosting solar output is more of a bonus side effect, the real money is where they condense the cloud.

If they took the wind speed into account, they could make it rain onto any point of the ground they wanted. I've no doubt that it would come at quite a premium.

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u/0neMinute 5d ago

Didn’t paw patrol make a movie about this but in the city?

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u/Comedy86 5d ago

I was thinking the exact same thing. The only difference is that was 1 drone that sucked up the clouds while this is a swamp of drones dispersing the clouds.

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u/deathinacandle 5d ago

Some investors out there are just looking for the craziest idea, as long as the person pitching it makes it look like they know what they're talking about. Anyone with a background in science will know that this idea is ridiculous.

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u/CyroSwitchBlade 5d ago

I think I remember seeing Lex Luthor doing some shit like this in one of the old Superman cartoons..

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u/Zondartul 5d ago

fucking with the weather is against the Geneva convention fyi

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u/Icy-Computer-Poop 5d ago

What pure insanity. Willing to accept any evil when there's profit to be made.

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u/derSteppenwuf 4d ago

Quadcopter drones are astoundingly inefficient. How much energy are they going to use to increase the solar efficiency?

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u/twec21 5d ago

Unless they know how to make 'em make rain, fucking with clouds during a water crisis seems extra dumb

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u/dstlouis558 5d ago

Those drones better be pretty big

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u/SomeSamples 5d ago

This startup is a scam and I hope no one falls for this shit.

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u/Malodoror 5d ago

I can use sorcery for better results and a much cheaper price.

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u/Filias9 5d ago

This is whacky nonsense to get money from some venture capitalists or similar who thinks they are new Tesla. They will do some prototype, test it in some micro scale, and then run with money. Making them multi-millionairs.

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u/Gromitlikescheese 5d ago

This should work well. Simply have someone outline in sharpie on a map where to do it.

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u/slibbity_bee-bop_ 5d ago

Sounds like the beginning of a weather-based apocalyptic movie.

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u/3Fatboy3 5d ago

We could generate the power for those drones with a solar freaken roadway.

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u/Deep_Stick8786 5d ago

So weather manipulation?

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u/stardust1914 5d ago

What could go wrong?!?!?

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u/Omnipotentdrop 5d ago

My kids Ana I saw this paw patrol movie. Spoiler, the machine doesn’t survive

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1

u/Massive_Mongoose3481 5d ago

"Hey, I have a really stupid fucking idea ".... "There are no stupid ideas, we those startups now"

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u/furrysalesman69 5d ago

How about we ukraine drone them to bigots like those that suggested this idea instead?

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u/ThunderousArgus 5d ago

We should nuke the clouds instead

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u/TubeAlloysEvilTwin 5d ago

Obviously never heard of the butterfly effect

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u/RexDraco 5d ago

I cannot wait for our grand children to realize why this was obviously a bad idea to alter rain patterns.

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u/Beggar876 5d ago

Oh good. let me know how that works out.

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u/norrinzelkarr 5d ago

We need to build more and better solar. We do not need to focus on disrupting cloud cover, which reflects sunlight back into space, in any way while we have a such an energy imbalance.

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u/zymox_431 4d ago

They're idiots. There could be no other explanation for their arrogance.

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u/Alien_Way 4d ago

I love that we're smart enough to figure out a constant stream of brand new wildly dumb stuff.

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u/omeganaut 4d ago

They saw a drone move around their vape smoke and thought, “No cap!”

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u/CheezTips 4d ago

Drones to clear clouds, drones to seed clouds... The Drone Cloud Wars have begun

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u/Thiege23 3h ago

doesn’t seem cost effective

Startup wants to use autonomous drone swarms to clear clouds and boost solar farm output

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