This is a question from Zach, who asks: Stopping rain from falling on something with an umbrella is boring.

What if you tried to stop rain with a laser that targeted and vaporized each incoming droplet before it could come within ten feet of the ground?

So stopping rain with a laser is one of those ideas that sounds totally reasonable, but… Well… ok. While the idea of a laser umbrella might be appealing, it- Ok.

The idea of stopping rain with a laser is a thing we are currently talking about. Now, it's not a very practical idea. First, let's look at how much energy the laser would need.

Vaporizing a liter of water takes about 2.6 megajoules of energy, and a big rainstorm might drop half an inch of rain per hour.

Oddly enough, you can just multiply these two numbers together in a smart calculator like Wolfram Alpha or Google and the units work out to give you an answer in terms of power per surface area, which is exactly what we're looking for: the calculator says we need 9 kilowatts of power per square meter we want to protect with our laser.

9 kilowatts per square meter is nearly 10 times the amount of power Earth's surface receives from the sun.

And while that sounds like a lot of energy, we need to remember that water's capacity to absorb energy is incredible: heating water up to boiling only takes around 10% of the energy – getting it from liquid to gas takes the other 90%.

Ultimately we're talking about filling the air with tons of hot steam, so either way, you'd be building a human-sized autoclave.

Needless to say, autoclaves are not really a popular place to live. But it gets worse!