《那些古怪又讓人憂心的問題》第127期:匯聚閃電(1)

ALL THE LIGHTNING

匯聚閃電

Q. If all the lightning strikes happening in the world on any given day all happened in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?

Q．如果某一天全世界發生的所有閃電都同時出現在一個地方，那麼那個地方會變成什麼樣？

——Trevor Jones

——特雷弗•瓊斯

A. THEY SAY LIGHTNING NEVER strikes in the same place twice.

A．人們常說閃電不會兩次擊中同一個地方。

“They” are wrong. From an evolutionary perspective, it's a little surprising that this saying has survived; you'd think that people who believed it would have been gradually filtered out of the living population.

“人們”錯了。從進化角度來說，這種說法能夠流傳下來有些不可思議，因爲相信這個說法的人應該會在進化的過程中慢慢被剔除出人類大家庭。

This is how evolution works, right?

這就是進化的淘汰法，對吧？

People often wonder whether we could harvest electrical power from lightning. On the face of it, it makes sense; after all, lightning is electricity,1 and there is indeed a substantial amount of power in a lightning strike. The problem is, it's hard to get lightning to strike where you want it.2

人們一直在找尋方法從閃電中獲取電能。乍一看這個想法有板有眼，畢竟閃電就是電嘛，1而且在閃電中確實有大量的能量。不過問題在於如何誘導閃電擊中你指定的地點。2

A typical lightning strike delivers enough energy to power a residential house for about two days. That means that even the Empire State building, which is struck by lightning about 100 times a year, wouldn't be able to keep a house running on lightning power alone.

普通的雷擊攜帶的能量夠一間民宅用上兩天左右，這意味着即使是像帝國大廈這樣每年被閃電擊中大約100次的地方，雷擊產生的電力甚至不夠照明用電。

Even in regions of the world with a lot of lightning, such as Florida and the eastern Congo, the power delivered to the ground by sunlight outweighs the power delivered by lightning by a factor of a million. Generating power from lightning is like building a wind farm whose blades are turned by a tornado: awesome impractical.3

就算是在像佛羅里達和剛果東部這種閃電頻繁的地區，地面接收太陽照射帶來的能量也要比雷擊帶來的能量多上100萬倍。通過雷擊發電有點像靠龍捲風驅動的風力牧場：完全不切實際嘛。