This is What the Wars of the Future Will Be Fought Over

Welcome to the rain wars.

J.J. Pryor
The Apeiron Blog
Published in
5 min readOct 4, 2021

A raindrop falling in the middle of a palm
Photo by Fabiano Rodrigues from Pexels

I’d be shocked if you haven’t heard of the term ‘fake news,’ but have you come across ‘fake rain’ before? It’s a surprisingly common occurrence.

Most know about cloud seeding, the process of sprinkling clouds with small amounts of silver-iodide or salt to induce rainfall. But scientists in the UK, Finland, and the UAE are about to find out if we can fight back against Zeus.

As in, can we electrocute clouds to induce rainfall, too?

Using advanced drone technology, they’ll be running several tests in the next few months to find out. And if it works — or at least at a scale that’s more effective than current technologies — it could have drastic implications for geopolitics in the not too far-off future.

Cloud Seeding Has Been Around for A While

Cloud seeding as a concept first came into practice in 1946, invented by chemist Vincent Schaefer and physicist Irving Langmuir.

Their work was furthered by Dr. Bernard Vonnegut, who invented the idea of using silver-iodide to change the physical structure of rain droplets in the sky.

Over the next 70 years, experiments were run in nearly every continent with…

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Published in The Apeiron Blog

An easy to read philosophical space that aims to elicit discussion and debate on matters of the universe.

Written by J.J. Pryor

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