I've been watching hurricane Dean make its trek across the Carribean. It's a monster storm, but thankfully it looks like it will miss most heavily populated areas. We've suffered through the worst drought in memory here where I live. Crops have turned to stubble, fires spring up almost unprovoked, the air is harsh and dusty. In other parts of the country, floods have done terrible damage.

The human race will enter a new era when we are able to control the weather globally. Several thousand years ago, we learned to cultivate. We are now able to cause the plants we select to start growing in the locations we choose. However, the pitiful truth is that, for the most part, we have no way to guarantee that they will actually grow. Couple this with the life and property loss due to flooding and other weather effects, and you have a very good case for global weather management.

Ahh, you say, but it can't be done.... the amount of energy required is far beyond our capability to deploy and control. Well, maybe not. We know a lot about chaos theory. One instance is the so-called "butterfly effect," which purports that the wing-flap of a butterfly is enough to start a chain reaction that can lead to the development of a hurricane. The mathematical underpinnings are well-understood. The bottom line is that there are events of such complexity (like weather) that tiny changes in the initial conditions will cause completely different final outcomes. On one day, stomping your foot on a snow-covered mountain might do nothing. The next day, it might cause an avalanche. For weather prediction, this is usually seen in a negative light. After all, how can we possibly predict the formation of a hurricane, or when it will rain, if it depends so critically on so many parameters? Seemingly even more remote is the ability to control these events.

My optimistic alter-ego predicts that eventually, we will not only be able to predict such events, but control them. The very fact that the weather is chaotic gives us the "hook" we need to gain control. As our understanding of chaos theory improves, I suspect we will learn that there are certain points in the development of chaotic behavior (e.g., the formation of a rainstorm) that respond predictably to small energy inputs. This might be in the form of an acoustic impulse, a flash of laser light, or something else. I suspect that we will also learn that the pattern of control input can be tailored to produce the desired outputs (amount of rain, etc.). We might design large-scale arrays of stimulators (imagine dozens of sound generators spaced several kilometers apart in strategic global locations) that, under computer control, maintain some measure of control over the daily global weather patterns. Hmmm. But who gets to choose the weather...