ALL THE LIGHTNING
汇聚闪电
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．如果某一天全世界发生的所有闪电都同时出现在一个地方，那么那个地方会变成什么样？
——Trevor Jones
——特雷弗•琼斯
A. THEY SAY LIGHTNING NEVER strikes in the same place twice.
A．人们常说闪电不会两次击中同一个地方。
“They” are wrong. From an evolutionary perspective, it 8217;s a little surprising that this saying has survived; you 8217;d think that people who believed it would have been gradually filtered out of the living population.
“人们”错了。从进化角度来说，这种说法能够流传下来有些不可思议，因为相信这个说法的人应该会在进化的过程中慢慢被剔除出人类大家庭。
This is how evolution works, right?
这就是进化的淘汰法，对吧？
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 8217;s hard to get lightning to strike where you want it.2
人们一直在找寻方法从闪电中获取电能。乍一看这个想法有板有眼，毕竟闪电就是电嘛，1而且在闪电中确实有大量的能量。不过问题在于如何诱导闪电击中你指定的地点。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 8217;t be able to keep a house running on lightning power alone.
普通的雷击携带的能量够一间民宅用上两天左右，这意味着即使是像帝国大厦这样每年被闪电击中大约100次的地方，雷击产生的电力甚至不够照明用电。
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
就算是在像佛罗里达和刚果东部这种闪电频繁的地区，地面接收太阳照射带来的能量也要比雷击带来的能量多上100万倍。通过雷击发电有点像靠龙卷风驱动的风力牧场：完全不切实际嘛。