Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

abcnews.go.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 593 posts

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#301

Post by prawn »

analog31 wrote: post #276
prawn wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for thinking it through a bit more in the spirit of the question. That's a bit more what I was getting at. There are potentially instances where it starts to become a grey area (responsibility with both parties), and the separate question is who would the public deem responsible.

I don't think it's a grey area at all. The first party is responsible for creating the situation, the second for how they deal with it. This happens all the time in cases where the police have to deal with someone who's threatening people.

That's the grey area I'm talking about though. If China sends a missile into the US, it's shot down, but there is collateral damage, Americans will overwhelmingly consider China responsible. If a Chinese airline flies a regular route and is abruptly shot down, and the plane crashes into a populated area, Americans would hopefully consider their own government responsible.

The grey area I'm musing about is in the middle, and how some portion of the public might be sympathetic, how this might be destabilising, and what avenues the agitator might explore.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#302

Post by moomoo11 »

phpisthebest wrote: post #212
oneoff786 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to understand that if you’re being attacked by a FTL capable alien invader, you are so incredibly f**ed that it just does not matter. People don’t write popular sci fi novels about realistic alien invasions because they would be so utterly one sided and brief that it simply wouldn’t make a good story.

I am sorry, if the Aliens are invading we will just have ChatGPT upload a virus to their system while at the same time we fly one on of their space planes with a nuke to take out their mother ship

Or it’s a node js program and they’re not able to download all the dependencies to counter it so they have to make a parley with us because the only way to stop it is to come to earth and download

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#303

Post by georgeg23 »

martyvis wrote: post #299
georgeg23 wrote: post #6

Balloons could be a clever counter to what the US is doing with Low Earth Orbit satellites recently. SpaceX is launching tons of spy/missile defense satellites over China as part of the Space Development Agency: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm More details: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Star…

Actually this morning I was thinking about the inaugural and hopefully successful flight of Starship maybe next month. While it is meant to demonstrate capability to orbit, it won't complete it and is intended to crash land off the coast of Hawaii. I think it will be passing over China to achieve that. Maybe they would like interpret it as effectively an ICBM test - and by allowing these balloons to be shot down give…

Starship will make Brilliant Pebbles a real possibility and China knows it.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#304

Post by revscat »

jansan wrote: post #185
akmarinov wrote: post #11

Have aliens invaded and we just don’t know about it, the government holding them off lowkey? Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...

Reagan said in his speach in front of the United Nations: "Our differences would vanish, if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAAHgAuti84 Also, in the Watchman comic the world is made believe in an alien invasion to bring world peace (the ending is different in the move). So let's hope that if these are (real of fake) aliens, the result will be a more peaceful wor…

> our differences would vanish

I wish that I could believe this. We have all seen the deleterious effect of Q and Fox News, and the zeal that goes along with them. At this point I believe that there are those who are so far gone into the partisan abyss that they would rather collaborate with alien invaders than with their fellow countrymen, if those countrymen were Democrats.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#305

Post by bagels »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #219
elorant wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A balloon that requires a missile to be brought down has to be really big, like soccer field big. In which case it won’t cost just $10k.

My understanding is that basically all of these balloons require missiles due to their altitude, not because of their structure. Edit: looks like I was wrong. The balloons were only 40-60k feet, which is within the range of military aircraft. reply

Do we the modern jets have guns still?

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#307

Post by georgeg23 »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #277
they4kman wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, so the lore goes, Musk just wanted to send humans to Mars, and had no intention, originally, to build his own rockets. The first tactic was to retool an ICBM for spacier spaceflight, but the Russians laughed them out of the country.

It was a simpler goal than that. From the first paragraph or two of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX > In August 2001, Musk shared a plenary talk with Mike Griffin at the fourth Mars Society convention where he announced his plans to send his greenhouse to Mars.[6] In October 2001, Musk travelled to Moscow with Jim Cantrell and Adeo Ressi to buy refurbished Dnepr ICBMs that could send the envisioned pa…

Elon got the Mars idea from Griffin.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#308

Post by mensetmanusman »

phpisthebest wrote: post #252
bhhaskin wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because operational security. Why give adversaries info about your capabilities.

Pretty sure everyone knows they can take IR photos from the Plane... That is not really a secret. Plus I reject the idea of secrecy from the citizens, government can not be "for the people by the people" if they keep secrets from the people

It’s amazing what you can learn about capabilities from a picture. Apparently German scientists during ww2 used the diameter of the Hiroshima explosion from the newspapers to calculate the mass of uranium involved.

Re: Military shoots down another high-altitude object, over Lake Huron: officials

#310

Post by mensetmanusman »

phpisthebest wrote: post #286
sangnoir wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resolution is secret - and that matters a lot. Why do citizens need to know detailed specs of IR optics systems installed on fighter jets? I can come up with reasons why this information should be kept out of adversaries hands: and handing this info out to citizens makes the latter impossible

>>and that matters a lot. Does it? and even if it does do they need to release the full resolution... you seem to be creating strawmen just to justify the government doing thing in secret, seems like an odd position. And quit with the "adversaries" scare mongering, it will get you no where with me other then enteral cringe and eye rolling. This "but the other baddies might do something" has been the straw man to just…

Run for election to propose this. Many people disagree with absolute real time openness because it puts one at a disadvantage when adversaries are not.
Post reply on HN