Which has more energy - a lightning bolt or a laser beam?

Question

If you took the most powerful laser in the world (I believe it is located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and is rated well into terawatts) and fired it at a target for, say, a fraction of a second, and then if you could get an average cloud-to-ground lightning bolt to hit a target for the same time interval, which would generate the most power?
Single lightning bolts have been rated well into millions of volts, but how would that compare to the energy of a laser beam, since laser beams are mass-less photos while lighting is made up of charged particles?

Answer 1

LIGHTNING BOLT

Despite centuries of scientific scrutiny--including Benjamin FranklinÆs famous experiment with a kite--lightning has remained a strangely mysterious phenomenon. Although scientists from FranklinÆs time onward have understood that electrical charges can slowly accumulate in clouds and then create brilliant flashes when the stored energy suddenly discharges, they puzzled for years over the exact physical mechanisms governing this process. How quickly do lightning strokes travel? What determines the path the energy takes? What happens to the bolt of electric current after it penetrates the ground? Such questions eventually yielded to scientific investigation. And this research has not only expanded the fundamental understanding of lightning, it has raised the prospect of exerting control over where lightning strikes--something traditionally considered a matter of divine whim.

Although lightning is inherently erratic, its aggregate effect is enormous. Every year in the U.S. (where about 20 million individual flashes hit the ground), lightning kills several hundred people and causes extensive property damage, including forest fires. Lightning is also responsible for about half the power failures in areas prone to thunderstorms, costing electric utility companies in this country perhaps as much as $1 billion annually in damaged equipment and lost revenue. Lightning can also disrupt the navigational devices on commercial airliners (or even on rockets bound for space), and it has caused one serious malfunction at a nuclear power plant.

Since ancient times, lightning has both awed and fascinated people with its splendor and might. The early Greeks, for instance, associated the lightning bolt with Zeus, their most powerful god. And even after a modern understanding of the electrical nature of lightning developed, certain mysteries persisted. Many observers described luminous displays flickering through the upper reaches of the night sky. Some of these curiosities could be explained as auroras or weirdly illuminated clouds, but others were more baffling. In particular, pilots flying through the darkness occasionally observed strange flashes above thunderstorms. But the scientific community largely regarded these reports as apocryphal--until 1990, when John R. Winckler and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota first captured one of these enigmatic phantoms using a video camera. Their images revealed lightning of a completely new configuration.

WincklerÆs achievement ushered in a flurry of activity to document such highaltitude electrical phenomena. And hundreds of similar observations--from the space shuttle, from aircraft and from the ground--have since followed. The result has been a growing appreciation that lightninglike effects are not at all restricted to the lower atmospheric layers sandwiched between storm clouds and the ground. Indeed, scientists now realize that electrical discharges take place regularly in the rarefied air up to 90 kilometers above thunderclouds.

Answer 2

I think that would all depend on how you measure the energy, if I remember right the laser could cause alot more damage, but the lightning has more electricity, so all depends on what you want to measure.... I think lol its late brain isnt working at 100%

Answer 3

Laser beam, the same question was asked in my science class.

Answer 4

it depends on how you measure the energy but for me..i think the lightning bolt has more energy...