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Comment by winReInstall | Hacker News Reader

What would it take to increase the likelihood of rain synthetically?

I know many are adverse to geo-engineering, but lets say i can predict the winds for the next days, i have a ocean, i have solar and ultrasonic humidifier , wouldnt it be feasable to basically create dense fog - cloud coverage from nothing that is then carried inlands were it rains down near mountain ranges?

You take one of the armies floating solar arrays, add the humidifiers and voila ready is a terra forming experiment never tried before.

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So your BATNA here is going to be irrigation canals. Can you make rain cheaper than you can dig, maintain and fill irrigation canals? Amortized over X years?

Clouds and rain occur when dust and airborne micro-organisms serve as crystalization sites for water vapor.

There's actually a positive feedback loop where the more life there is (in, for instance, a rain forest), the more rain occurs there, as plants emit various pollens and atomized oils into the air.

Similarly, if you destroy ecosystems and decimate biomass, there is nothing in the air for water vapor to glom onto and you will soon have a desert.

I have an ongoing disagreement with a good friend that the drought in Lion King was caused by Scar's poor ecosystem management, she insists it was coincidence.

The University of Colorado has a research group that has been working on evaluating the efficacy of cloud seeding to increase winter snowpack in mountains. Here's one of their papers: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1917204117

Desalination is already viable and massively in a lot of countries. Of course you need the sea nearby.

> What would it take to increase the likelihood of rain synthetically?

At this point, the issue isn't just likelihood of rain, but a cataclysmic shift in climate conditions, which we knowingly cause, and against which we don't want to act. It's not simply about favoring long term over short term, our society has effectively become a death cult, even on the short term.

You know, people already live in Australia and they don't die from it. We are gonna survive climate change.

Just curious, Australia being mostly desert, if the rest of the planet became similarly barren, would it still work out? I don't know how food-independent Australia is...

Like the aborigines did it.

With a maximum estimated population of a few millions living on 7 million square kilometers, that's not really a great path to follow for Earth's current 8 billion inhabitants sharing about 150 million square kilometers.

Most of them will starve beforehand anyways.

There's a difference between some people living in hard places supported by outside help, and whose ecosystem has had long durations to adapt, and many people seeing their normal weather change extremely quickly and their ecosystem stressed at incredible rates.

Humanity will survive, there will be survivors. Our current civilization maybe not, it has hyper optimized itself for money to the point of fragility.

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