Do you remember the old fashioned flashlights, before there were LEDs ?
They had two or three heavy batteries in the tube, and one little tiny glass light bulb in the middle of the little headlight in the front. When the batteries were fresh, that little light bulb gave out a nice bright beam of light, and drew about <em>0.7 Amperes</em> from the batteries. That's the number I want you to remember for a couple of minutes: Flashlight bulb, 0.7 Amperes.
-- The wiring (nerves) that operate your heart can go haywire, and your heart can stop or go crazy, if <em>0.015 Amp</em> of current or more happens to pass close by it.
-- The muscles in your arms or legs, or your diaphragm that makes you breathe, can lock up so that you can't control them, if <em>0.1 Amp</em> of current or more happens to pass by them. If that current is <em>0.5 Amp</em> or more and passes close to a muscle, the muscle can lock up so violently that it breaks the arm- or leg-bone that it's attached to.
Lightning is electric current flowing between a cloud and the ground. If anything is in the path it wants, it just flows right on through.
Lightning may flow in either direction ... up to the cloud or down to the ground. It really doesn't make any difference. The effects are the same, on anything it decides to flow through.
The current in a typical, average lightning bolt is <em>30,000 Amperes</em>. A lot of them are bigger.
Current flowing through anything causes heat to be generated.
The more current = the more heat.
-- Lightning flowing through the wall of a house generates enough heat inside the wall to make the wall explode.
-- Lightning flowing through the juice inside a tree generates enough heat to boil the tree juice, and explode the tree.
-- Lightning flowing through the air heats a skinny tube of air so hot and so fast that the air explodes. That makes a strong sound wave in the air, that can be heard from miles away. It's called "thunder".
-- A person is made of lots of nice soft, moist, mushy stuff, water, juices, and air. A thousand Amperes flowing through it all can do a fast, efficient, complete job of heating it, boiling it, cooking it, exploding it, and tearing it to pieces.
Sounds dangerous to me.
