(3 of 3)
No wonder, then, that man's great dream has been some day to control the weather. The first step toward control, of course, is knowledge, and scientists have been hard at work for years trying to keep track of the weather. The U.S. and other nations have created an international apparatus that maintains some 100.000 stations to check the weather round the clock in every sector of the globe and, with satellites, in a good deal of the more than 4 billion cubic miles of the atmosphere.
With computers on tap and electronic eyes in the sky, modern man has thus come far in dealing with the weather, alternately his nemesis and benefactor. Yet man's predicament today is not too far removed from that of his remote ancestors.
For all the advances of scientific forecasting, in spite of the thousands of daily bulletins and advisories that get flashed about, the weather is still ultimately capricious and unpredictable. Man's dream of controlling it is still just that — a dream.
The very idea of control, in fact, raises enormous and troublesome questions.
Who would decide what weather to program? Since weather patterns are interrelated, would interference cause harmful imbalances? Is weather that appears to be beneficial to man also beneficial to nature? The vision of scheduled weather also raises ambiguous feelings among the world's billions of weather fans — and poses at least one irresistible question: If weather were as predictable as holidays and eclipses, what in the world would everyone talk about?
—Frank Trippett