Ill be darned. I knew they had calculated that the strike initiation energy was pretty damn close to cosmic ray energies. What I didnt know is that they never proved it experimentally.
Back in college we were playing around with it in astrophysics. A couple of things we toyed with were a relativistic charged particle (well a bunch of them really) penetrating deeper into the atmosphere - particle cross section is a probablistic interaction, not a certainty.
If a high enough energy particle (or group of particles) enters the static field in a cloud, the particle will occasionally travel a distance before being absorbed. Most of the time, this would result in cloud to cloud lighting (which is much more frequent), because of simply creating a lower path of resistance and the spike electrelectric field.
That would mean that cloud to ground strikes would require even higher energies to traverse the much longer distance. Problem with relativistic particles is that they only get so fast. So you’d really need a heavier particle. Much heavier charged particle. Traveling at relativistic speeds. It turns out that proton ions fit well into it. But you would have to have a particle accelerator to really send a beam of these ions to the atmosphere to do it. And solar flares don’t get them fast enough.
BUT it turns out there are plenty of sources of such beams in space. Black holes and neutron stars namely. Throw in the gamma radiation background interacting with the atmosphere? And you are cooking with enough energy sources to reliably produce lightning.
My rule is: if you’re gonna trauma dump, let me do it too.
Because then we start off with a good commiseration and we get to see how traumatized we are and if that trauma will prevent or enable chemistry.