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

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

#361

Post by sangnoir »

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…

> This is the same reason all cops should be required to wear body cams and make the video public

At the same time, we[1] don't demand that detectives publish notes from ongoing investigations, yet we pay for that too. Not acknowledging the reality of adversarial circumstances is shortsighted.

1. Perhaps I'm being presumptuous and you think investigations should be fully transparent in realtime.

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

#362

Post by lampshades »

tzs wrote: post #324
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.

There was an amusing short story called "The Road Not Taken" about that. In it gravity manipulation technology turns out to be really simple. It is something every civilization (except one) discovers early, like before they reach what on Earth would have been medieval technology level, and then all their technological development is focused on their gravity technology. The one civilization that somehow missed gravity…

I wanted to read the story, here's a link: https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

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

#363

Post by kiddz »

It seems like the reporting is that two out of three objects are said not to be balloons. I don’t know of any terrestrial technology that can be that large (size of car) aloft for multiple hours/days that hovers. Am I correctly groking the news here?

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

#364

Post by ALittleLight »

kube-system wrote: post #295
ALittleLight wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't understand the ambiguity from the government and military. They have to have pictures of these things. Show us what they look like. Tell us if they are balloons. Are they under power against the wind? What speed? All these details must be known, it's been days, why aren't they telling us?

I would imagine that if these are small and hard to detect, you may not want everyone to understand the exact extent of your capability to detect them. The first balloon didn’t have this consideration because it could be seen from the ground.

This seems like an argument to not shoot them down. If we can identify and track them then obviously we can determine their speed. If we can fly by with fighter planes then we can get a visual look. I don't see how we'd be giving anything away about our capabilities by sharing these things.

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

#365

Post by krapp »

tzs wrote: post #324
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.

There was an amusing short story called "The Road Not Taken" about that. In it gravity manipulation technology turns out to be really simple. It is something every civilization (except one) discovers early, like before they reach what on Earth would have been medieval technology level, and then all their technological development is focused on their gravity technology. The one civilization that somehow missed gravity…

>So when the alien invaders arrive with the FTL ships and release their conquering armies...our automatic machine guns and missiles and tanks and bazookas and such totally outmatch the aliens troops who have flintlock rifles and black powder.

That doesn't even make sense. Why would having simple gravity manipulation stop progress on the development of other technologies, particularly weapons?

Especially if, as it seems, those weapons aren't mitigated by having gravity manipulation? Literally no one in the universe realized the potential of having gravity manipulation and modern technology?

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

#366

Post by handedness »

LarryMullins wrote: post #217
handedness wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UN is certainly something more than that, and not literally just a forum. They have an active duty peacekeeping force of approximately 81K people. While that's similar in size to the active duty forces from a nation like a Peru or Chile, the Blue Helmets have had a de facto quasi-blanket immunity when committing war crimes, and have some pretty horrifying history in places like Central Africa. For example: "Consi…

You're right of course, but in the context of China and the US this doesn't really seem relevant. Being invaded by UN blue helmets isn't something that happens to any member of the UN Security Council, which both China and the US are. When it comes to relations between these two countries, the UN is "just a forum".

It will sound like I'm arguing against myself, but hear me out: when it comes to relations between these two countries, the UN is a relatively feckless PR platform at best, and not even a forum, despite what numerous aides seem to hopelessly believe (and bless their eager little hearts for it). You're right that their peacekeeping forces are a rounding error for either nation.

The original point to which I was replying is that they don't understand why people call on a mere forum to solve their problems. Some regions repeatedly look to UN peacekeepers to solve their problems and so the forum designation is insufficient to describe it.

But the UN is oddly violent for a mere forum, some would say immorally so. War crimes are as old as war, but war is war. The UN is this bizarrely unaccountable keeper of peace and rape. And many people really don't understand the UN's modest peacekeeping capabilities and the collateral damage they often bring to a conflict, and often wrongly believe the UN is a silver bullet when it's far from it. I believe that's why people repeatedly think the UN is a solution to problems it mostly isn't.

That's the scope of what I was trying to address. My added detail about its structural and fundamental flaw of having no real mechanism for recourse when its troops commit war crimes was just to properly frame what an inherently deficient entity it really is.

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

#369

Post by theteapot »

kiddz wrote: post #363

It seems like the reporting is that two out of three objects are said not to be balloons. I don’t know of any terrestrial technology that can be that large (size of car) aloft for multiple hours/days that hovers. Am I correctly groking the news here?

Car sized balloons. Gliders. "Hover" is conjecture.

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

#370

Post by ianburrell »

cududa wrote: post #64
nemo44x wrote: post #36

So I’m guessing we recently upgraded or reconfigured some software and now we are seeing a lot of things that have been there but we didn’t detect. Or something finally crossed a line and the enemy, which did not know we were watching was going to find out so it’s all being cleaned up now.

NORAD said after the last balloon they modeled it and recalibrated their signal filtering to lower the thresholds (full transparency: I know what those words mean when string together, but I’m no expert and have 0 functional knowledge of what that means wrt NORAD). Now that they’ve said that, I’m actually more concerned and it raises more questions than it answers. Perspective of some retired NORAD employee would be…

I saw comment that said they removed the speed gate filter. I think that means filter was removing slowly moving contacts. By removing the filter, they saw balloons and the hovering maybe-balloon objects.
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