Rainmaker – enhancing precipitation
Precipitating solutions to fix fresh water scarcity, and whether we should.
What’s cool about this org?
Rainmaker started with the goal of solving water scarcity and identified precipitation enhancement as the only practical solution.
Ever heard of seeding a cloud? Me neither, but/and “enhancing precipitation” has a long – by modern standards – history, event its own gravitas and mythology, if you will.
And of course it does. We need fresh water to drink and grow food – and to take a dip, to cool off, to paddle and canoe and much more – and droughts are on a category all of their own when it comes to existential threats.
According to Wikipedia, this history begins “in the summer of 1948”, when “the usually humid city of Alexandria, Louisiana, under Mayor Carl B. Close, seeded a cloud with dry ice at the municipal airport during a drought; quickly 0.85 inches (22 mm) of rain fell”.
To seed a cloud! Imagine the minds that came together in Alexandria –ominous– no longer praying for rain but taking matters into their own hands, coming up with ideas. The pilot who wants to “get up there” to the cloudless skies, the chemist who thinks of dry ice and its potential applications, the transportation and logistics involved, the mayor – the scientifically-inclined mayor? – green-lighting this strange endeavor, this wild proposal. People coming together to fix the drought problem, to make rain. What a wonderful scene to consider, human ingenuity at its finest.
It’s cool to consider what challenges a human organization can take on, enabled by technological and cultural advancements, and the possibilities that emerge when human beings collaborate with one another and, maybe, with the other-than-human world. Whether we should take on these challenges or not is left as an exercise to do for yourself, dear reader.
Applied technologies
I like the idea of drones, or Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs), doing good, or potentially good, things for humanity and the more-than-human world.
According to Rainmaker’s website:
Recent advancements in radar validation, modern autonomous systems, and numerical weather modeling have transformed precipitation enhancement into a viable commercial pursuit with demonstrable results.
I spot a trend. As challenges become more complex, so do the tech stacks of the organizations who try to tackle them. Deploying existing technologies to these ends will result in its own kind of intelligence and strategy, for many of these advanced technologies don’t come with clear guidelines on what you can and cannot do with them. (Companies releasing new LLMs, for example, don’t include release notes, which has been a standard for decades for any company creating and releasing software. The upper limits are unknown, the playbooks infinite).
De-growth is not a strategy
I like the ideology – even the movement – behind de-growth. But it’s simply not a viable strategy. Slowing down is part of it, of better aligning human systems with ecological processes, but human civilization also needs to keep running, and it runs on energy, highways and other infrastructure that require resources. Resources like rain, as much of our agricultural systems now rely on unpredictable water sources.
The challenges of geo-engineering
If we’re not slowing down, what alternatives do we have? More geo-engineering proposals like Rainmaker’s is one such category of alternatives.
There’s a quote from Henry Hazlitt that has stayed with me since college, comparing what he considers a “good” economist vs. a “bad” one:
The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups
The shoe fits if we swapped “economist” for “geo-engineer” or “environmentalist” or “climate entrepreneur”. We are now forced to consider questions like:
What are the “longer and indirect consequences” of cloud seeding and enhancing precipitation? How does geo-engineering shape cultural systems?
How do we make sure we establish rules and regulations that support experimentation and innovation while also ensuring that we don’t cause more damage? How do we make sure we limit catastrophic mistakes, and how do we learn from the inevitable mistakes that will happen?
And when we use the term “sustainable”, what do we mean? What’s the time horizon?
I have no idea where any of this goes, and if we should control the weather even if we have the technologies to do so. What I do know is that it is going to be weird, and we’ll need to get comfortable with organizations being run by, as one eloquent YouTube commentator puts it: “a dude [who] has a mullet, a satellite truck & Jesus on his shirt”.
We definitely should continue to build the muscle for holding organizations accountable because, in fact, it is already weird:
Learn more
Do check out their website – and behold, for it is a wonderful website:
https://www.rainmaker.com/