Cloud seeding is like alchemy but better

Why we should use ~pseudoscientific~ magic to make water abundant

There is an arcane, almost magical, field of science concerned with transforming useless materials into life-giving riches. Knowledge of the field has been lost to the ages, but there are whispers that it is still practiced by rogues at the ends of the Earth. Is this a description of alchemy or cloud seeding? Both.

A brief description of alchemy

The primary aspect of alchemy is the conversion of lesser materials into greater, more perfect, and more valuable ones. For example, an alchemist might try to transmute lead into gold. Or, a more experienced alchemist, might try to make a potion of eternal life out of various herbs. It's like magic, but with a chemical, almost scientific component. A little less hocus pocus and a little more procedure.

Obviously, an activity as lucrative as this attracts attention. Unsurprisingly, the nobility of premodern history often employed alchemists to conjure up material fortunes or life-giving elixirs. To the chagrin of their employers, most alchemists failed in one of two ways. In one case, they were snake oil salesmen from the start and had no intention of delivering on their promise. In the other case, the alchemist was a genuine student of the craft, but was “just missing one final piece of knowledge” that could only be learned in a long-lost tome in Egypt, India, or some other place at the proverbial “end of the earth.”

Could the latter variety of alchemists have been correct? A modern reader may scornfully regard him as a pseudoscientist engaged in nonsensical poppycock. “How could we forget how to turn lead into gold? If it were possible, the technology would be everywhere!” Be wary of blindly accepting that idea. Technologies have been lost to time before. The composition of Greek fire, a weapon commonly used in naval warfare circa 600 A.D., is now unknown. A slew of Nikola Tesla’s inventions has been lost in the last century too. This isn’t to say that the promise of alchemy is actually achievable, but to suggest that sometimes mythic technologies of the past truly did exist.

What is cloud seeding and how is it similar to alchemy?

“Water Bro, I came here for water industry info, not obscure techno-historical musings.” Well, you’re welcome for getting more than you bargained for. Now here is the water content.

Similarity #1: It's magical, sorta

Cloud seeding is a supposed method of increasing the amount of precipitation that falls from clouds. “Controlling the weather?! That sounds like magic!” But, cloud seeding alleges to use chemical compounds, delivered by flying planes into clouds, to induce the desired precipitation. Hence, its first similarity to alchemy: cloud seeding alleges to produce magical results via scientific means.

Similarity #2: It's lucrative

Precipitation is a big deal in the American Southwest. We constantly hear about the scarcity of water. Up until the rains of January 2023, talk of drought was never-ending. And in California, despite the recent storms depositing over 200% of the historic snowpack for January, we are still bombarded with media about how the drought marches on! The consequent line of reasoning from these headlines is that the state’s farms must be abandoned, the hydroelectric plants may run dry, and golf courses aren’t allowed to exist anymore. 

But, what if we just had more rain? If we could produce more rain, we could keep the farms. In fact, if we controlled the weather, areas that are too far from rivers for irrigation may become arable via artificial rain. With more rain at the top of our watersheds, perhaps we could convert muddy little streams into rivers capable of producing hydroelectric power. And maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about billion-dollar infrastructure projects to desalinate the whole pacific. Via cloud seeding, we can convert the unproductive water in clouds into economically productive precipitation. This is the second similarity to alchemy. Cloud seeding can produce gold.

Disclaimer:

Of course, the condensed water in clouds reflects light, cools the earth, etc., etc. Lead also serves a purpose. We can use it to make bullets, paint, and all sorts of useful stuff. But, gold is still more valuable. Although I understand that cloud water has value, rainwater is still more valuable.

Similarity #3: It is life-giving

As precious as gold is, life itself is still more valuable. And just like alchemy promised elixirs of life, cloud seeding promises to breathe life into our environment.

 In the status quo, the aridification (i.e. death) of millions of acres of flora in the southwest is a foregone conclusion. The Salton Sea in Imperial County, California is a harbinger of the aridification to come. The sea itself, now 343 square miles in area, has shrunk by 38 square miles in the last ten years. This shrinkage has not only destroyed countless miles of animal habitats, but the air around the sea has become so dusty that it's giving all the nearby humans asthma too. 

As you can sea, the Salton Sea has shrunk

Various ways to halt or reverse the sea’s aridification have been proposed, most of which involve pumping desalinated water 125 miles north from the Sea of Cortez into the Salton. This is an awesome idea. However, conservative estimates of such a project’s cost are about 50 billion dollars. This is not awesome, and unfortunately, the cost of transporting water via large-scale infrastructure is often prohibitive. 

Cloud seeding solves this problem by using the water that mother nature transports to you! In the 8,000 square mile drainage basin of the Salton Sea, there are plenty of clouds ripe to be seeded. And, here's the real kicker, precedent suggests the same ends of the 50 billion dollar project could be accomplished, via cloud seeding, for about 15 million dollars annually.

Similarity #3: Its practice has been forgotten

“What precedent? People are doing this already? Why aren’t we doing it right now?” All great questions, all of which bring us to the third, striking similarity between cloud seeding and alchemy. Knowledge of cloud seeding has been lost to time, and it is now only conducted “at the ends of the earth”.

Artificially inducing precipitation was first confirmed as possible in the 1940s. For the ensuing three decades, there was a flurry of academic, commercial, and military cloud seeding operations. The United States Bureau of Reclamation sponsored projects in California, Texas, Montana, Thailand, Morocco, and elsewhere with great benefits to agriculture! The United States military used cloud seeding in Vietnam to extend the monsoon season over the Ho Chi Minh Trail by an average of more than 30 days per year. Multiple successful attempts were made to seed hurricanes off the coast of the eastern seaboard, thereby causing them to mellow before making landfall. It was an incredible stretch of innovation, and one largely overlooked because of the simultaneous strides we made in space-fairing technology.

1966 photo of the fellas of Project Stormfury, a United States Weather Bureau project to stop hurricanes via cloud seeding

Since this heyday, cloud seeding has fallen out of the spotlight not with a bang, but a whimper. In the 1960s-1970s China issued protests to American cloud seeding efforts in Guam, and we stopped researching in the pacific. Universities diverted their interest to understanding the mechanics of storms, rather than modifying them. Fear that cloud seeding might worsen hurricanes in the Atlantic caused protests domestically. Now, there are only a handful of active, token operations scattered around overlooked corners of the country. And even these operations are now viewed with skepticism by eggheaded American academics who doubt the technology ever worked at all.

Yet, there are whispers of practitioners “at the ends of the earth”. China, despite its former protests, now runs a gigantic and sophisticated program of cloud seeding. In 2020, they announced they would begin seeding over two million square miles. For context, that is more than half the area of the United States. The United Arab Emirates is also a pioneer in modern cloud seeding tech and has made up for its lack of scale with its innovative drone-based approach.

If the rest of the world is benefiting from cloud seeding, why don’t we?

The answer to this question brings us back to alchemy. So far, I have described what are known as the exoteric aspects of alchemy (i.e. the aspects pertaining to how someone can practically apply it to the world). There are also the “esoteric” aspects of alchemy, the spiritual and psychological knowledge involved in its practice. How these two aspects relate to one another is exemplified in the transmutation of lead into gold. To the alchemist, turning lead into gold had little, if anything, to do with rearranging the protons and neutrons of the material. What he was interested in was purifying, sanctifying, and redeeming something lesser to make it holier. Stick with me here. By redeeming nature, the alchemist could redeem his own broken soul.

Similarity #4: It has to do with our souls

Our society does not actively pursue cloud seeding because we don’t think our soul is worth redeeming. We stop short of enhancing nature. Instead, we only try and fail to preserve it because we fear that any large intervention of ours will do harm. In just the same way we stopped going to the moon because our civilization’s spirit stopped asking it of us, so too did we stop cloud seeding.

We should pursue more cloud seeding

We should save the Southwest from the encroaching desert. We should save the flora, fauna, and people living around the Salton Sea.

But we should strive for more than these meager goals. We should enhance the flow of rivers to make them robust enough to support populations of fish ten times larger than they are now. What has become wasteland ought to be converted into fields and forests that symbiotically benefit both humans and wildlife. We should stop hurricanes, improve the environment, and make water abundant. These magical aspirations can easily and affordably be accomplished with technology that has existed for the better part of a century if only we have the spirit to use it.