To that classic nerd question—If you could have one superpower, what would it be?—there's only one convincing answer. It's not invisibility. Or flight. The right answer is, but of course, control of the weather. There's a reason Storm is considered, even among mutants, a god. It's the same reason Zeus and Thor are considered, even among gods, unchallengeably powerful. To control the weather is to control everything. When the God of the Old Testament wants to punish humanity for all time, what's He do? He makes it rain. A lot.
So what happens when humanity itself pursues this power? In a phrase: weird shit! This week, we take to the skies with WIRED science writer and editor Amit Katwala. Literally: His new story opens in midair, in the cockpit of a small plane. Back on the ground, Amit visits the Mount Olympus of these modern-day storm gods: the National Center of Meteorology in the United Arab Emirates. For years, the Emiratis have been spending millions on "rain enhancement," aka cloud seeding, that artificial means by which us mortals can, kinda sorta, make it rain on demand. They think they've cracked the technology. Amit isn't so sure.
I wanted to call this piece "Cloudy with a Chance of Seedballs"; nobody liked that. And maybe it is too cutesy—because this is freaky-deaky, Promethean stuff. "We are as gods," Stewart Brand famously said, "and might as well get good at it." What's it mean to get good at being godlike? How will we know how good we've gotten? At one point, Amit finds himself in Zeus' inner chamber, where the literal lightning gets made. He wants to reach out and feel it. But the voice of the gods is clear: Don't touch.
Editor’s Note: AI’s complicated social life
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