It seems inevitable that eventually someone in a different dimension would find a way to start crossing dimensions, and start a recon program to report back on "good" dimensions.
Maybe they had no idea that was a thing. A super advanced species that either never considered it or was phased out so long ago the knowledge was lost. They’re just up there watching and freaking out a bit.
As we've seen with our space probes, its difficult enough to land something on another planet and have it survive, nevermind equipping it with any offensive or defensive capabilities. Maybe these aliens are in the same place. They can get the balloon here, but just barely, and they're watching in dismay as their work get dismantled.
Utter nonsense. This would be a FTL alien civ. A civilization with many orders of magnitude more energy available. And manufacturing capabilities. And AI. And many other things. They’re not gonna send a stupid balloon. They’re not going to care about a balloon. It’s inconceivable that a civ could get here and not also have the ability to manufacture such basic technology on an enormous scale very easily.
Breakthrough Starshot is about sending a couple grams of tech on a multi decade journey. We are very far from having the tech to do this. You’re right. They don’t technically need to be FTL capable. But the rest of it remains. You’ll need an immense amount of energy move this far.
If you can get balloons into earth safely, you can also just pelt the planet with big chunks of metal at speeds more deadly than nuclear explosions.
You know when you’re playing with a little kid and they fake punch you, and you dramatically go flying across the room and they laugh, they’re proud of themselves, and you laugh? Yeah the aliens playing that game with us right now.
“The Asgard would never invent a weapon that propels small weights of iron and carbon alloys, by igniting a powder of potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur.”
There has been speculation that China is testing our response. It seems unclear what the purpose of hovering over Montana is. Maybe they are actually testing something they'd like to attack or monitor Taiwan with and the way to test in an obfuscated manner is releasing them over the US to get the response without triggering the idea that they are preparing for another, real target.
It is possible that it is both. The first one was Chinese spy balloon. Part of long line but this one was bigger, noticed from the ground, and government had to do something about it.
The air defense folks increased the sensitivity of radars and started finding the UFOs. Maybe the UFOs were keeping away from population areas and radars but now were being picked up.
It is strange that the objects aren't stealthed. Which makes sense for balloon payload. But stealth, hovering, car-sized objects should be hard to detect. Maybe aliens don't know about stealth. The other weird thing is that they just hover. For advanced or alien technology, I would expect them to move away or dodge.
Also that we are seeing a lot more now because we have turned down/off the filters on the radars. Which means also we can expect a lot more false positives.
> Which means also we can expect a lot more false positives.
Perhaps we can, but clearly we can expect to find actual UAVs corresponding to these radar signals.
If these UAVs that have been shot down were domestic research balloons or some other aircraft exempt from FAA regulation, then we can expect a party to come forward and publicly acknowledge ownership/control of the UAV.
However, based on the descriptions of the object over Alaska it seems very likely there are indeed unmanned drones being operated by foreign governments and not domestic weather/research balloons or FAA compliant unregistered domestic aircraft.
Keep in mind that not only US or Canada launches weather balloons. These things are well capable of flying huge distances, including across the oceans. There has been one launched by amateur radio operators a few years ago that has circumnavigated the globe - and that's not at all a rare feat.
So no need to go all conspirationalist about "unmanned drones operated by foreign governments" just yet. Especially given the distances and altitudes these things were found flying at - a heavier than air device would need a ton of fuel and energy to fly that high and that far, so a "drone" that at the same time doesn't look like an aircraft is rather unlikely.
I was under the impression that weather balloons fly well above the max altitude of commercial airliners (60k ft). It seems significant that the last 3 “objects” have been encountered at typical airliner altitudes (40k ft or under)
Of course those balloons enter airspace with the permission of the sovereign state. If no permission is sought and granted then it's fair game for the sovereign state to do whatever they please with them.
It is not a tinfoil hat theory to point out that a balloon that is not playing by weather balloon rules is not a weather balloon. Route planning hasn't suddenly gotten more difficult in the past week.
The only new aspect is that you are being told about it. Which is unfortunately probably not a good sign. At best it will be only used to justify the purchase of some expensive "hi tech" boondoggle to counter these... balloons.
Ok the fact that they found an actual patent for the cube in the sphere UFO is just hilarious.
This whole thing is just genius on so many levels. Exploit the stigma about aliens by constructing small drones and make them appear wacky beyond belief to guarantee they'll go unreported. Exploit the radar filters for small and slow moving craft with motionless soft balloons. And it worked brilliantly.
It seems like the government is way better at disinformation than it is about demonstrating competence. Like most governments in history. For the platinum plated price, we should expect more, though.
> I believe that those in power who snicker about credible reports of strange objects in the sky and stymie research into them, including access to classified data, have become a threat to national security themselves. Their lack of imagination, curiosity, and creativity appears to have built a near-perfect vacuum that our enemies could exploit and likely have exploited to an astonishing degree.
> asleep at the wheel with this threat the DoD has been
That's easy to say, but does anyone know how many objects appear when you drop the filter? Yes, the military has a huge budget, but it's not unlimited. My guess is when you lower the filter you're met with so many objects that you couldn't possibly address them all with the resources you have available.
Imagine you have 10 resources to deploy and a screen with 100 objects to investigate. You lower the filter and there are now a million objects to investigate. It's not hard to understand why the filters were in place and saying they were "asleep" is silly. There have probably been people at the DoD asking for more resources ($) to remove the filters for years.
Well, two were over remote parts of Alaska. And this one just happened like an hour ago, so maybe pics will come out from people on the ground. In any case, the best pics from the first one over Montana were shot with telephoto lenses, so it’s not like anybody with a phone can snap a close up shot
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
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 justify all manner of immoral actions by the US government over the decades that I have no sympathy for that argument at all
>>Why do citizens need to know detailed specs of IR optics systems installed on fighter jets?
because we paid for it, because we own it, because we can not accurately hold elected government to account for their actions if we do not know what they actions really are. We have no idea what they are shooting down. Maybe it some private plane of of political enemy, maybe is a Alien Drone, maybe is some weather balloon, maybe is a Chinese Spy Drone......
We only have their word... and their word means nothing to me
This is the same reason all cops should be required to wear body cams and make the video public
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.
> 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.
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.
You can’t tell the mass of the uranium from the size of the explosion unless you already know exact details of the bomb design (in which case you would already know the mass of the uranium).
They're probably being targeted before getting in range of media cameras, and are likely classified until declassified. I would doubt if we see another one over populated areas anytime soon. I would also bet these start getting shot down as they enter the ADIZ.
To explain to the rest of the class - right now Huron is a wind-whipped, cold, miserable place to be. It’s not surprising Johnny Fisherman isn’t out these days.
Is there a chance that this is a low-effort and low-risk way for China/whoever to further stir up drama in the US? "Where's the proof?" "They're making this up. I haven't seen a photo of the balloon..."
Information is being selectively withheld to manipulate public opinion, and legacy media outlets are cooperating because that’s what they exist to do - amplify on demand.
While the government will classify their information thinking the media has it but isn't posting it is really just dumb. If any member of the public had it, it would have spread across Twitter/tictok like wildfire.
>Between 900 and 1,300 locations around the globe do routine releases, two or four times daily.
On the other hand, weather balloons are not silver-gray and cylindrical. A Google image search shows them almost always white and spherical to teardrop shape and pretty much unmistakably a balloon.
Also the weather balloons are launched on consistent schedule / from consistent consistent locations and they often have a transmitter that allows them to send back data and even be found right?
Not to say one of these can't be a weather balloon, but I would expect these also are known possibilities / somewhat detectable / aren't trying to be sneaky ...
Yup. There are different requirements depending on payload size, but if you’re doing it regularly even if you don’t have to, you send appropriate information anyway notifying the right people locally what is flying where, expected flight paths, descriptions, exact times, etc.
We did a balloon launch a long time ago, it had a radio sending back telemetry and we chased it across Colorado scrub land hundreds of miles.
> Commercially available radar reflectors are frequently found as a sailboat supply item
Wooden and fiberglass boats are fairly invisible to radar, even with metal masts and rigging. If you are ever planning to head out into the ocean and near where you might expect commercial shipping, these are a cheap safety item for making your boat visible.
If you attempt to go near larger commercial shipping lanes you are required to have them at least were I live, they are not optional here. Also get the right size, some smaller ones are useless (so I've been told).
> If you attempt to go near larger commercial shipping lanes you are required to have them at least were I live, they are not optional here.
Not required in the US, but not a bad idea to hoist one in fog.
Although these days, an AIS transmitter is a better answer. But a prudent mariner never trusts a single point of failure, so might as well do both.
Admittedly I don't always hoist the radar reflector in the heavy fog near the Golden Gate bridge, but I always transmit AIS in low visibility (and monitor it).
Most weather balloons are small. The balloon is 3ft across at the ground. The payload is phone-sized or computer-sized. The payload wouldn't be visible to fighter.
There are large scientific balloons. I couldn't find any standards of large balloons using transponders. They have communications and tracking so location is known. I wonder if NORAD is in contact with all the organizations about their balloons.
I suspect there will be move to put ADS-B on larger balloons.
There are websites ([0] as an example) that will help you predict where your balloon will land. When I was involved in a launch, we had a cheap GPS tracker, a couple of GoPros, a battery pack, and an Arduino with a bunch of shields to take readings. I don't remember the specific site we used at the time, but it was pretty damn accurate. It was especially useful in that the original location we wanted to launch from predicted the landing spot would be near the runway of an Air Force base. We moved our launch location based entirely on where this site predicted it would land.
Not only did our balloon have the parachute and radar reflector, we also put blinking lights on it. Since there was no transmitter on it, I had to call 2 different phone numbers to give status updates to report anticipated altitude progress. The first was the regional airport, and the second number was the larger airport 2 hours away that we were in the line of their approach pattern. The first airport would then notify the closer joint air base that they did not feel like we needed to call directly. At one point, we lost contact with our cheap GPS because it reached altitudes beyond what the company anticipated civilians to be doing. ATC informed us they were tracking it, and we were a little off in our altitude estimates within 5000'.
All of that to say, no, it was not e-waste. we got it all back minus the bits of the balloon that exploded into pieces no longer attached.
Interestingly drones are likely to replace weather balloons, they have several advantages like reusability as well as more control over data collection density on ascent.
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
Lots and lots of satellites that keep passing overhead and you compose the images to abstract away the fact they came from multiple physical satellites.
There's only one company with that capability and that's the only organization in the world ever to achieve first stage (and soon all stage) reusability for LEO launches.
Because to achieve that you need to put a lot of stuff in orbit and the only way to affordably do that is cheap (reusable) launches.
The technical change is that you can build very useful, very small sats, which are cheap. Current SpaceX launch costs are lower, but like 1/2 price and 2x is not a big premium for a national security need.
> In 2002, Griffin was President and COO of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests. During this time, he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia where they attempted to purchase ICBMs.
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.
> 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 payloads into space.[7]
They were not laughing because it was an impossible idea. They were laughing because they have seen an opportunity to part a rich person from his money.
Or laughing because it was absurd, Griffin was CIA. The US had just left the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, and so it was obvious to everyone they wanted to develop low cost launch for a Brilliant Pebbles reboot. Now it's finally happening.
First off, I don't buy the underlying premise because the US has been launching satellites with global coverage for 50 years... I don't see why China would wait until now to respond.
But for your question, with LEO satellites you don't really target specific countries. They cover every country within a given latitude range. A round LEO orbit that goes over the US must also go over China.
However you don't need geostationary orbits to target a given part of the globe. Molniya orbits do the same thing more or less and work better if you want coverage further away from the equator. They were popularized by the USSR and the US and China use them to varying extents.
The SDA satellites are barely skimming Earth's atmosphere and may eventually take a more "active" role intercepting missiles and even targeting the ground, at least that's according to the SDA program's founder,
https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/space-based-missile-defe...
SpaceX has launched 8 Starshield satellites. Nobody knows what they do but they are probably testbeds for platform and space link communications. There are SDA launches planned for March and June.
I wouldn't expect to see spy satellites from the SDA; the NRO has always controlled those. I could believe small spy satellites if launched from NRO. There haven't been any details on how missile defense will work from space with small satellites. The descriptions I've seen have been about communication and detecting hypersonic weapons with infrared sensors. The latter is not what I would think of as spy satellite or missile defense.
The US government knows exactly what is going on up there at all times and most likely has the most advanced spying satellites and capabilities out of all countries.
It is highly unlikely that you can see a coin on the ground from LEO, given the size of the telescope and the laws of physics[1].
Assuming a great number of things, a larger than Hubble 3 meter aperture, 200km orbit, red 750nm light, zero atmospheric distortion, the resolving power cannot be better than 6.1 centimeter resolution.
tan(750e-9/31.22)200000
= 0.061
If you want the best possible example of NRO's capabilities, the best example in recent memory is when trump unintentionally disclosed them with the highest resolution satellite image I personally have ever seen [2]
Maybe some of the poorer networks have residual 3G equipment, but in general, the US has been cracking down on Huawei for a decade. They don't have a huge presence in the US.
Some hardware failure happens, but it's not that frequent, if it's like previous generations of cell technology, most of it will run until the operator chooses to shut down that particular service e.g. switching to a newer generation and freeing up the spectrum for it.
Even with Huawei equipment fieled (which there isnt much left, Cricket and Clearwire were the largest incumbents for it, and those networks are gone) the BTS does not have network access to phone home, they're walled off with very very very non-routable IP's (as in stuff used on the pubic internet) - there are too many layers of access control for what was being alleged to work in a practical sense.
If you don't have a large enough LEO constellation you will have sporadic and predictable coverage. This is especially true if you want global coverage to monitor a military like the USA with a global presence.
1. Wouldn't these balloons provide even more sporadic coverage? They seem to be detectable.
2. These gaps would be measured in minutes, and are zero when you considered the combined coverage of all none-nato countries. Anything that we don't want seen is done under cover.
2. If you can scramble a jet within mins, that may be all you need. If you consider that LEO internet projects like SpaceX and Kuiper are targeting 5-10k sats to cover the earth i don't think it's a given that "all non-nato countries" have enough to provide constant coverage, especially if you go back 5-10 years. That probably won't be true in another 5-10 years.
1. Some reports say that they've only been detected recently; referencing multiple undetected occurrences during the Trump presidency; o they've been working for X years already. If they're undetected, they can view into gaps referenced above. If this program has been going on for 5-10 years undetected then it still could have been of value to China/Russia/Whoever owns them.
Starlink is in a completely different class of "tons of satellites" as other platforms simply due to the SpaceX launch vehicles.
China has a total of 600-ish satellites together for all purposes. Starlink has 3500-ish right now, and the already licensed plans are for 12000 by 2026. When(if!) Starship starts launching satellites, a single launch can put in orbit more military satellites than China has ever launched, and it does not seem have a comparable capability in the near future.
You underestimate how incredibly difficult the work that SpaceX is doing is. No spaceflight oraganization in the world is close to having the capabilities that SpaceX has right now (Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy). Meanwhile Starship is almost ready.
That's why you do industrial espionage though; take advantage of all the R&D done by someone else, so most of the pitfalls are overcome and a lot of the testing is done.
Like knowing what kinds of alloys turned out not to work and why, etc. So you don't have to repeat all that.
Honestly this espionage thing is overrated. Plenty of employees in the US take their knowledge to (domestic) competitors and find it quite hard to just clone a business. The Russians and US were stealing each other's plans during the space race but this often led to misunderstood and suboptimal designs. See Buran
looking at the launch numbers from 2022 you can see that china is fairly close to having the capabilities of the us. Falcon heavy is still several years away from being useful in any capacity.
SpaceX is launching more than twoce the payload to orbit than the rest of the world combined though... without starship.
Also how is Falcon Heavy years away from being useful?
The simple was to counter this is through polluting that space with debris. Sure, it clears out in a couple of years, but then you can just put up more of it. Getting into a arms race in orbit is a bad idea for everyone.
If they wanted low key interception of civilian terrestrial radio signals, seems like it would be better to just rent a Uhaul or RV, load it up with radio gear, and drive it across the country.
As long as you are in airspace and not in space (and those balloons weren't), it's not legal to violate airspace and wiretap signals without permission. So U-Haul wouldn't be much different. And the balloon was very slow as well, at least a truck you can drive and park exactly where you need it.
Low Earth Orbit satellites of the US are 100% intercepting global cell phone data and geo locating their source. Plenty of companies are even building direct cell phone service from satellite to the ground, including SpaceX.
Surveillance satellites are very different to directly flying this equipment into US airspace, including the fact that this equipment could hold paylods other than ISR. Not to mention this comment implies China does not have equivalent spy satellites, which it does. Also the UN is an absolute joke. That article links has China and Russia complaining about the West being aggressors so honestly its kinda BS. Also forgetting about China's [ASAT test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fengyun) which has been the worst in history.
UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters. Nothing more nothing less. I have no idea why people expect UN to take action, when UN is explicitly not an organisation for taking any actions.
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:
"Consider a small sample of heinous cases: in April 2016 Foreign Policy reported that, in the Central African Republic, a French commander tied up four girls and forced them to have sex with a dog. Soldiers from France, Gabon, and Burundi sexually abused at least 108 women and children in a single province. In July 2015, The Washington Post reported that peacekeepers in Haiti engaged in ‘transactional sex’ with over 229 women and girls in exchange for food, medicine, or other necessities.
"Most recently, it was published in the The Washington Post in February 2016 that ‘four peacekeepers had allegedly paid girls as young as 13 as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex in a different camp for the internally displaced’ and ‘as many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomised six boys ages nine to 15’."
"the Blue Helmets have had a de facto quasi-blanket immunity when committing war crimes, and have some pretty horrifying history"
First, I don't think calling them "blue helmets" has the negative connotation you think it does.
Second. What's the difference between the UN peacekeepers and any other army? All have a mixed history and I'm pretty sure have let's say a high amount of immunity.
People do bad things, especially soldiers who have power and the cover of war. This will never change. Of course crimes should be prosecuted as well but I don't know much about the details of the UN peacekeepers.
As you stated you don't know much about their details, it wasn't meant to be pejorative: they're actually called Blue Helmets (and Blue Berets). I would wager their most defining visual characteristic is their helmet color, which is quite terrible as camouflage and wholly unsuitable for a conventional military force.
Their Rules of Engagement are also significantly different from those of a conventional military force.
The International Court of Justice (the IJC–not the ICC) is part of the United Nations System. At that body, at least, UN peacekeepers enjoy blanket immunity. To oversimplify it, it's another case of, "we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
The UN nominally expects host countries to prosecute the war crimes of their peacekeepers, but in reality the nature of deploying to somewhere needing peacekeepers is that the rule of law on the ground is already minimal, at best. So there's no real enforcement mechanism to prosecute these crimes.
It is not a trivial distinction. One can debate their virtue and utility value one way or the other, but the distinction is real and significant. They operate under a unique set of circumstances and saying war is hell and victors typically enjoy their own brand of immunity is true enough, but not entirely applicable here.
Who are we comparing them to, though? The US Military publically ran (and runs) an international network of torture camps. I don't think the US military is especially bad: rather, all militaries are awful, all war is unadulturated evil, and any attempt to make it 'clean' through ROEs or accountability procedures is stupid.
The whole point is that they are without comparison. There is no other force like it in the world. By definition it may have to be that way (if it should exist, which I'm not entirely sure it should), but so long as there are UN peacekeepers there will be armed troops where nobody's really both motivated and able to prosecute their war crimes with any reliability.
The legal framework surrounding UN peacekeeping is insufficient as the UN itself grants its peacekeepers blanket immunity, and expects host and/or contributing nations to prosecute war crimes committed by UN peacekeepers. But those nations are almost by definition unable to maintain the rule of law (or in the case of contributing nations, unlikely or unwilling to prosecute).
I'm not sure why "but other people also do bad stuff" is where everyone seems to go with that information. But to go along it, a more apt comparison would be the Mahmudiyah rape and killings: war crimes committed by US troops in Iraq, in which the perpetrators were tried, convicted and sentenced in American military and civilian courts. That's how that aspect of the inevitable evils of war should be handled:
Had the perpetrators been UN peacekeepers, the host nation likely would not have had the ability to prosecute the accused competently and fairly, and the UN would have given them immunity if expected to act. The contributing nation would not have wanted to prosecute for a whole host of reasons.
One can argue that the UN is doing what it can, but it isn't much: Asking contributing nations to prosecute war crimes committed by their citizens (not likely), shaming those nations [1], and trying to support the victims [2]. Which all goes to show that the UN is rather toothless on the matter. There's an asymmetry to their ability to contribute to violence but not prosecute the criminal abuses thereof. I think that's concerning.
Regardless, your comparison reminds me that even Abu Ghraib resulted in numerous prison terms. Make of that what you will.
Sounds like Blackwater to me, including sample unpunished accusations of war crimes like spraying crowds of civilians with automatic fire.
We all know US will declare war on Belgium IIRC if international court of justice will ever sentence any US soldier, all pretty unique scenarios.
Blue helmets may not all be saints, but they did and do some important security work in semi-failed states ie in Africa where otherwise gangs would chop civilians from other tribes if left unchecked. Also kept Balcan states more stable after war. You are simply choosing to not see forest for the trees for whatever personal reasons.
I'm not really doing whataboutism. I just think that the contemporary framework for thinking about 'war crimes' is asinine, and the traditional framework, where a war of aggression was in itself the 'ur-crime', makes more sense. The US is an interesting case study for me, not because they're so awful, but rather because they (almost uniquely) have both the resources and the resolve to avoid war crimes, and yet, the results are hardly distinguishable from states with neither. The figures are not yet there, but I doubt the rate of violent death during the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be signifigantly in excess of that seen in Iraq in 2003, or in 1990, despite the fact that the Russians seem to make no effort to avoid civilian casualties, and the US made fairly comprehensive efforts.
The vast majority of the damage done by a war is not in massacres, or isolated incidents, but rather in the normal practice of warfare: attacks upon infrastructure, collateral damage, blockades and sanctions. These are the drivers that send life expectancy plummeting, and the idea that you can 'clean' war by avoiding some forms of violence, generally selected for symbolic reasons, is absurd.
So in the case of the UN, the reason why it's a good model is that the UN is unlikely to engage in wars of aggression, so even if the conduct of its soldiers are awful, they are ultimately less problematic than a national military.
Indeed. Abu Ghraib is actually kind of unique in US history, it is an exception of the norm where the people responsible are actually charged, found guilty, and not pardoned after the fact. Compare this to e.g. Guantanamo—which is still, over two decades later, holding people captive which have never been charged of any crime—has not held anyone responsible for systematic torturing of prisoners. Obama even went so far to explicitly immunize James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen who designed the torture program, as on of the first thing he did in office.
Even the Nosiour square massacre in 2007, which was a particularly atrocious, and not conducted by a military personnel, took a whole year to file charges (despite overwhelming evidence) found five Blackwater soldiers guilty, but had the charges dropped on technicality in 2009 (despite taking a whole year in preparing the charges). Now later rulings found this was an error, and four of them were finally charged with the massacre 2014 (seven years after the massacre). Charges were as such:
- Dustin Heard - 12½ years in prison
- Evan Liberty - 14 years in prison
- Nicholas Slatten - Life without the possibility of parole
- Paul Slough - 15 years in prison
Additionally Jeremy Ridgeway got 1 year and 1 day in prison in a special deal by pleading guilty and testifying against the other.
Predictably all four (not Ridgeway) were then pardoned by Trump in 2020.
This is a clear case of the US justice system not actually wanting to press these charges, and only did so reluctantly after an immense pressure from the electorate.
If you also compare the Nisour Square Massacre to the helicopter murders of journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh (as leaked by Chelsea Manning). The only people that answered for those murders were Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, and that was only for revealing the truth about those murders.
is there no mechanic for them to be prosecuted by the UN itself? as some kind of court-martial or something? Or even their own countries, sounds absolutely insane to expect the judicial system of a country that needs a peacekeeping force to come in to deal with it.
Right, that's the crux of it. All these other comments saying "[actors] subject to [entity] also did bad things" miss the point. Immunity is supposed to only apply to acts performed in their official capacity, but it in practice it has often been applied much more broadly than that.
In fairness to the UN, it's not an easy problem to solve: who's going to volunteer to act as a peacekeeper in a place where if the wrong faction ultimately prevails, you will be subject to the local jurisdiction and all of the corruption that may entail? Unlike military service, UN peacekeepers do not have the same degree of national backing to rely on when things go south.
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.
Another function of the UN is to make diplomatic relations between all countries more legible. When everyone is forced to vote yes/no/abstain this information leaks out in a coordinated fashion. Whether that’s good or bad for world peace that’s another matter.
I can cite henious cases committed by London Police force. Just a couple months ago we've convicted 'bastard dave'. He was a cop and used his position to become a serial rapist and a murderer, and he had a nickname, which strongly suggests some of his colleagues knew something.
You have to assess three points to understand if the entire organisation is responsoble.
Have they commited significantly more warcrimes, than comparable situation suggests is, dreadfull to say, normal? Say during occupation of Iraq? For blue helmets I mean, I hope London police do not think of themselves that way.
Can these acts be traced back to some higher level of command, that is either turning a blind eye or is actively encouraging them?
When these acts become known, are the perpetrators punished, or are these acts tolerated?
I have not studied history of blue helmets, but these are the kind of questions you should be seeking to answer.
It's not about citing heinous cases. You're solving for a different aspect of the problem. Bastard Dave was convicted via an existing enforcement mechanism that in that case was at least arguably functional. The point is if Bastard Dave were a UN peacekeeper in central Africa, the host nation would be unable to try the case, and the UN itself mostly grants its own people blanket immunity and wouldn't prosecute it, either.
Don't forget the brave Dutch battalion that protected the civilians of Srebrenica in the secure UN enclave, oh wait, they didn't, they handed them off to Serb forces to be executed.
It was a badly thought out mission that was handed to the wrong unit and didn't receive any of the support it needed. There's no way a light infantry battalion could have defended Srebrenica from Mladic's army. It was theatre based on the hope that Mladic wouldn't attack.
While it was a particularly poor showing for a UN mission, and badly handled at every possible level, I don't think it's comparable raping children. It wasn't the UN soldiers who murdered the civilians, they were just completely unable to prevent it, and provided only an illusion of defense.
The pattern of civilized diplomats and governments being incapable to handle or even imagine the dog-dominates-dog perspectives of aggressors, even chastising parties acting appropriate, while being placated by other diplomats- who try to gamble for time, to create facts on the ground.
If anything, the doves are way to often the pets of the butcher.
The UN peacekeeping force exists only when the states in the forum agree to form one. It's not like "the UN" is sending troops, but a few states - not every UN member mind you - put some troops together, give them blue insignia and send them do the things they agreed in the forum to do.
The UN is a powerful, active international organization. If you aren't aware of that, you don't know what you are talking about. It's certainly limited in many ways and imperfect, but it transforms international affairs, freedom, and human rights.
Ignorant, cynical claims on the the Internet do a lot of harm to real people, by tearing down valuable things that people need.
> UN decisions are more like a veil or facade of moral Authority
Not so; "veil" or "facade" implies fakeness or concealment. The U.N. does not hide its mission or its position on human rights.
> One of the great achievements of the United Nations is the creation of a comprehensive body of human rights law—a universal and internationally protected code to which all nations can subscribe and all people aspire. The United Nations has defined a broad range of internationally accepted rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. It has also established mechanisms to promote and protect these rights and to assist states in carrying out their responsibilities. [1]
The lack of consensus and consistency is an ongoing challenge, sure, but it doesn't make the goals fake. Countries are flawed and have competing interests, but it is important to nudge the world in a better direction.
It's all to appease the major powers to not use their nukes.
To a degree, it also gives the lesser players a voice to feel heard so that they continue to participate in the economic system that benefits the big players. Again, this keeps the big players from acting unilaterally, imperialistically, etc. in a way that threatens the use of nukes.
A side benefit is that this lets the bigger players test their geopolitical strategies without dangerous surprises. If tensions can be expressed and gently eased into a final state, that prevents a flash bang.
It's kept us from having another world war. Or nuclear exchange. Here's hoping we keep it up.
Looked it up. In 2020 we spent $2bn on the UN. We brought in $3421bn, so (ignoring that we overspent by 2x) that is like 0.06%. if you make $100k you pay like $18k in federal tax. So that comes out to $10.50 or so.
This is such a pedantic and unnecessary line of questioning. Based on my understanding of the federal budget, my contribution to the UN last year would be somewhere between $100 and $200.
Why are you and the other GP asking about individual contributions? Isn't that more than enough to be irritated with their existence or capacities? $150/year is a significant amount that I'd definitely rather not pay.
This is based on one estimate that 1.2% of the federal budget was for the UN. Another estimate says 11.2b in 2020, when the federal budget was 4.79t. That estimate knocks my contribution significantly lower (anywhere from $10-40).
This is misinformed. The UN does take a lot of 'actions', one of the most important ones being Peackeeping missions. The explicit mission of the UN is to avert violent conflict.
It's interesting to me that this has become such a common internet talking point. A while ago, I finished reading a history of the UN (the one by Stanley Meisler), and I definitely got the impression that the founders of the UN wanted it to be more than just a forum. E.g. here are some passages I hilighted from Chapter 1:
"Americans could envision the Soviet Union joining the United States in policing the peace in the brighter new world that would arise from the carnage [of WW2]" (page 2)
"The Soviet ambassador... was even stronger than the others in pleading for a security council with teeth" (page 9)
"Chopping the air with his hands to emphasize his words, Truman said the new UN must keep the world 'free from the fear of war'." (page 19)
More generally the ongoing theme of the book is the extent to which the UN has been successful, and unsuccessful, at ensuring world peace in various conflicts that have flared since its founding.
I did get the impression that not a lot of thought was put into the design of the UN, and there is the possibility that it could've been much more successful with a radically different design.
[Edit: To be more concrete -- Google tells me that global military spending was $2.1 trillion in 2021. You'd think it would be worth putting a mere 1% of that $2.1 trillion, something like $21 billion, into essay competitions, agent-based simulations, online diplomacy games, academic literature reviews, etc. in order to design an optimal UN structure that minimizes the risk of war. But the actual structure of the UN was designed using far, far less than $21 billion worth of analysis, based on what I recall from the Meisler book.]
That's not to say that the UN being a forum is bad or unnecessary. But it's interesting to me how everyone seems to have forgotten its original eutopian aspiration to create a world free from war. Maybe has something to do with the fact that people who lived through WW2 are mostly dead now, and few living people understand at a visceral level how horrifying war between great powers really is.
> It's interesting to me that this has become such a common internet talking point. A while ago, I finished reading a history of the UN (the one by Stanley Meisler), and I definitely got the impression that the founders of the UN wanted it to be more than just a forum.
Exactly, and that's not even that unusual in terms of the 20th century, e.g. I believe Desert Storm was officially a UN force as well. The book discusses a lot of examples of people talking about sending UN troops somewhere and that either happening or not happening (and often, it happened!)
I think it is maybe only after the Iraq War that people stopped thinking of the UN as an alternative to conventional war politics. IIRC, Bush acted unilaterally without UN approval, and now it kinda seems like the "you should get UN approval before making war" norm has been lost? I don't remember anyone even discussing the possibility of UN approval for any more recent US military actions like in Libya. And the UN hasn't played a large role in Ukraine either -- I suppose that might be because Russia is on the security council?
> UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters.
Article 43 of the UN Charter would, if it were ever implemented, create a military force under the control of the UN Security Council.
>The potential of the United Nations and its Charter remained a dominant subject in schools and communities into the 1950s, focused especially on those Charter promises to protect member states "against violators of the peace." Chapter VII dealt with enforcement action: Article 39 first authorized the Security Council to "determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression"; Article 42 was designed to respond with "air, sea or land forces as may be necessary"; and Article 43 committed all UN member states "to make available to the Security Council, on its call, armed forces, assistance, facilities, including rights of passage necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security." Although much hope for the future was placed in the ratification of Article 43, it was never implemented.
Can you be more specific? I'm from a country that people would consider part of "The West". However we've never attacked anyone except invaders in entire country's history.
I'm sure you could dredge up some connection to the US and get angry with us about it, if you were an Islamic extremist or something. More realistically though, you could find fault with any country with that attitude.
Speaking of current geopolitics instead of historical, the recent blame for causing a rise in aggression lies firmly with Russia and China. The US is not blameless but neither are they starting any new wars in almost two decades.
So, tell me again about why everything is the fault of "The West", including all the western countries who have never attacked anyone, in your mind?
The Iraq War of 2003 [1] began with an invasion almost two decades ago (anniv will be in March 2003 iirc) with participation of a coalition of Western governments. That "almost" is doing heavy lifting given that this war officially lasted until ~2011 and led to further interventions as recently as 2014[2].
Notably, a non-trivial rationale for this war were lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction - which unsurprisingly, were never found. I am curious if your government participated in this war.
Ignoring the ongoing interventions in foreign conflicts [3][4], US Foreign Policy has been absolutely _disastrous_ for a number of countries around the world. From the perspective of the US Govt, this may be fine though I would argue that the real effects from destabilization and strained bilateral relations are simply accumulating. Happy to provide citations for multiple blunders in the last 3 decades. It is not surprising that many countries in the global south now see China|Russia|India as better bilateral partners.
Devolving critique to simply originating from "if you were an Islamic extremist of something" is very reductive and I would implore you to read more about global politics from different national perspectives.
This would have to be addressed knowing the details of the country. It's hand-waving to say that a country has never attacked. For instance, Ireland lets attacking aircraft use their facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_neutrality
Right and all of the EU benefits and invests in the World Bank which is one of the major forces used to keep the third world always in a state of "developing" through structural adjustment policies that keep them from ever actually developing
I think at this point the World Bank owes a lot of these countries but every time they market something as "debt forgiveness" it just turns into more of the same thing we've seen with structural readjustment. I'd recommend Ha-Joon Chang's Kicking Away the Ladder if you wanna see a deep dive into the topic
> So, tell me again about why everything is the fault of "The West", including all the western countries who have never attacked anyone, in your mind?
Not the person you're responding to, but I think it is important to recognize that the US is practically the military of The West (and some more like Japan and Korea), or rather those on the side of democracy in the cold war. Lots of this is because after a bunch of very big wars in Europe (Napoleonic Wars, WWI, WWII) -- and a bunch of smaller wars -- the countries essentially decided that it was best to have smaller militaries and out source it to somewhere that didn't have a long history of border disputes. Helped that the US already had a strong military, were an ocean away, and their bordering neighbors aren't major competitors. On the flip side, the USSR was essentially this same thing but for the communist side (till China started to rise in power). Some military historians suggest that the rise of super powers was a big component for the long peace. There's a lot to this history that's way more complicated than can be put in a singular comment and involves much more of the globe than just Europe (even the US's, Mexico's, and Canada's independences rely and exacerbated on these conflicts). People use this history to write a wide variety of narratives.
I found that line of thought, peace through war or rather weapons, very weak when I first encountered it in a school's classroom in the 80s.
I find it untrue. Real peace can only be without weapons.
I don't want to go back to this same old rhetoric I grew up with and which I was happy to have ended, until 9/11 and the US making a 180° turn, because now they had no one to counter their ambitions to dominate the world, which doesn't validate the rhetoric, because obviously only 1 side laid down their weapons.
The US saw this as "we won, now we can act unrestricted". But Russia didn't lose. They willingly stopped the cold war.
That is very important in understanding the current aggression and narrative.
I found the argument weak as well when I first encountered it. But as I got older I realized something important into the game theory. If all but one power had no weapons then this means that if that singular power decides to be aggressive, then they will have the ability to take from the rest. I then realized that weapons are fairly ubiquitous in that neither can you have defensive systems that can't be used offensively nor can you have a lot of engineering without also having weapons related technologies. This to me doesn't mean we need a military industrial complex, but it does mean, to me, that we need some minimal military. It does also mean that as citizens we should protest needless violence by our countries. (And if the US is going to act as world police regardless, we need to ensure that situations we engage in are moral. E.g. you could support Ukraine's fight for freedom but not the war in Iraq). The real world is extremely complex.
I'd love to live in a world without weapons, but I don't see how such a thing is even possible, from multiple angles. If that's not possible, then it is about how to minimize fighting and lives lost. After all, that is why we'd want no weapons. That solution space is rather complex and likely non-convex.
The reason there is peace is that the European nations formed an economic union with a high degree of interdependence and the obvious restriction on a certain ww2 losing country to no longer have a functioning army and go full pacifism as its geographic location allows it to attack all of Europe simultaneously.
The German Bundeswehr is a joke to the point where it is even unable to defend its own country and no German politician in charge of the military has ever felt like that is a problem worthy of attention for more than half a century.
There is no singular factor for the long peace in Europe. I don't claim superpowers are the reason either, just that the argument is made. The situation is far too complicated for me -- one who is neither a historical, economist, nor military strategist -- to make strong conclusions. There's too many coupled variables and causal variables.
You've lost credibility completely with this sentence. While I'd agree that many news outlets have their biases, some hugely so, saying everything they say is a lie is just categorically wrong.
Many news outlets like Reuters and the PA have business models based around factual reporting for others.
Calling everything a lie is certainly wrong, but glossing over biases in publications like Reuters is also a big mistake. Fact-based reporting can still communicate a wrong picture by deciding what and how much to report on something, and how the tone is set. To give a random example of this, in 2020 Australian soldiers were caught murdering and torturing Afghanis. In a "gloaty" response, the Chinese foreign minister retweeted a caricature on the topic made by a Chinese artist. [0]
From what I could find, Reuters wrote 3 articles on the topic of war crimes committed by Australian forces, with a very balanced and careful tone [1], and at least 8 articles on the tweet, consistently calling the caricature a "fake image" while not even showing the picture. Not only is there an obvious association between "fake image" and "fake news", apparently twitter drama was also deemed more important than the actual investigation into war crimes.
A balloon could also be in the way for airplanes. A balloon could also drop its payload, on purpose or by accident. The recent balloons have been reported to carry a load the size of up to several buses so I guess if that falls to ground it could cause quite some damage.
Not sure satellites can shoot missiles or drop bombs that could hit earth in any effective manner.
Payloads from a balloon could be dropped, payloads released in orbit stay in orbit. LEO would be a very bad choice for anything intended to eventually interact with the ground in other ways than using electromagnetic waves.
Not a ground strike device. While it could of course be seen as a ground strike enabler, if the operator saw it as a sufficient counter to any opposing second strike capability, it's strictly an interceptor for suborbital passers-by.
A limit to the airspace belonging to each country has to be defined.
Otherwise (for example) the Apollo missions would have violated USSR's airspace whenever the moon's orbit was above it's territory, which would make space unusable for everyone.
There's actually a non trivial amount of air in low earth orbit. For example the ISS or Starlink satellites would experienced drag and reenter in only a few years without periodic thrusting. At Starlink launch dispense they are even lower and reenter in days.
True, but I'd consider a height at which an object with sufficient speed will happily do a few orbits before eventually succumbing to drag to be safely in the "not air" realm.
Well, technically if I'm not completely wrong the moon's ground track missed the southernmost extension of the USSR by a few degrees of latitude, but that nitpicking certainly does not put your point into question.
Check your source, per your cited wiki page:
> The shootdown, and the subsequent creation of a record-setting amount of in-orbit debris, drew serious international criticism.[15][16][17][18][19]
For [16] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17497766
It's referring to a debris from Russia rocket, itself is a routine affair in the space.
> The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) briefly took refuge in escape capsules as a piece of space junk hurtled by.
> The debris - a discarded piece of Russian rocket - was detected on Friday when it was too late to move the ISS.
For reference [19], https://www.npr.org/2007/01/19/6923805/chinese-missile-destr...
> The governments of Britain, Japan and Australia are voicing concern over China's apparent test of an anti-satellite missile. The United States says China shot down one of its own aging weather satellites last week, in a kind of target practice in low Earth orbit.
> "I was surprised that they were able to do it," Kristensen says.
Seems about routine as any space tests...
Then the conclusion is that China's ASAT test is "the worst in history."
With evidences that are as substantial as web3's value to society.
This type of post on HN is simply not passing the quality bar on HN...
Reference 16 is cited because of the following paragraph:
> The single biggest debris-generating event happened in 2007, when China used a missile to destroy one of its own satellites. The explosion created more than 3,000 trackable objects and an estimated 150,000 debris particles.
Also, comparing the BBC to Fox on coverage of anything is disingenuous at best. Even if they have clear biases, the BBC is one of the most respected news outlets in the world, and have been very rarely just lying about facts.
Edit: also, reference 15 includes an archive link, so the fact that it is currently unreachable is entirely irrelevant. Here is a sample from the archive link you misleadingly ignored:
> The official debris count from China’s anti-satellite missile test has reached 1,337 pieces big enough to be tracked and NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office is estimating more than 35,000 pieces larger than 1 cm [...] This makes the January 11 test the largest debris-generating event in history, surpassing the previous record set in 1996, according to Dr. T.S. Kelso. Dr. Kelso serves as Senior Research Astrodynamicist in the Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI) and webmaster of CelesTrak, a site dedicated to tracking space objects and monitoring them for in-orbit collisions.
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 gives them some sort of tit-for-tat justification to bring down Starship earlier than Elon (and NASA, FAA, etc) would like. (Some sort of MAD muscle flexing)
Google was pretty open about their balloons. As far as I know, no one in China has taken responsibility for the balloon, or at least provided a plausible story behind it. They are leaving everything up to our imagination, which is a lot during an otherwise boring week.
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?
Strongly suggests against balloons - mainly because they already shot one down and it was no biggie. Aliens are not impossible any more, but drones of some kind remain the vastly most probable option.
Drone at 40000 feet? That's higher than most airliners - that would need be one heck of a drone, especially given where they have shot it down and how far it would have had to fly.
Much more likely sounding/meteorological balloons - a lot of those are sent up every day, worldwide, with payloads that are roughly cylindrical in shape. And some of them can traverse huge distances, even across oceans, so such "UFO" doesn't need to originate locally at all.
The jet stream currently has a strong west to east north east component from Montana to the Great lakes. The winds peed varies greatly depending on altitude, but a floating object can easily be pushed along at speeds in excess of 120mph.
NASA’s XL-Calibur travelled over 4,000 km between Sweden and Nunavut in 5-7 days[1]. Montana to Huron is less then half the distance. 24 hours is a bit fast, but not impossible.
EDIT: To give a more clear example. It took XL-Calibur a little more then 30 hour to travel from Hudson Bay to Yellowknife. That is not much shorter then some distance between Montana and Huron
It sounded like they are hovering at altitude which is hard to do. And they came from great distance. It would make more sense if they were triangle shaped and flying. Also, there was no balloon, they should be stealthed and not show up on radar.
My suspicion is that the descriptions have been of the payloads. They sound like balloon payloads. Maybe the balloon is low visibility. But doesn't explain why government doesn't mention balloons.
The outside possibility that isn't aliens is anti-gravity. I would strange that anyone who developed anti-gravity would keep secret and use it like this.
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.
Yes, although the actions reveal different things. Shooting it down establishes that your capabilities are good enough to do so. But sharing more detail about how you detected or observed it may reveal the limits of your capability. Or it may reveal advanced capability that an adversary is heavily relies on you not being capable of.
Your enemy only needs to be slightly better than your capabilities to beat you. If they can judge it accurately, they can more efficiently spend resources to counter your ability. If they misjudge, they either waste a ton of time and money, or they end up outmatched.
It’s like a game of poker. Those who are good at strategically releasing partial information are at an advantage.
They are cylindrical, grey, without apparent means of aerial propulsion, and prone to interfering with ultrasonic sensors...
Most dolphins are smaller than a compact car, but I bet they would break apart upon impact with a frozen sea after dropping out of the sky. This might be the correct answer.
> That balloon’s journey set off a huge debate within the U.S. about why it wasn’t shot down earlier, with Republicans arguing President Donald Trump never would’ve allowed such a thing to happen. Except that it did, many times, including over sensitive military facilities in Virginia and California.
There’s something hilarious about the idea that, if this was the start of an alien invasion, our journalists and politicians started off the coverage not being curious about what on Earth these objects were, but instead slinging political slime at each other
Didn't expect to dive into xcom timeline right now...do I need to buy some guns to defend against aliens? I mean at least you can hurt them by guns in the game.
People have forgotten 20 years ago the US intercepted Iraqi aluminium tubes. They are fully capable of detecting what ever they want to imagine. And these days American imagination is purely restricted to what collects Likes and upvotes.
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 liked Titan A.E.'s take on that. An alien race (the Drej) attack and destroy the Earth and the Moon, while simultaneously attacking evacuation shuttles. Most of humanity is wiped out in mere minutes. No silver lining. No happy ending at this stage. What's left of humanity is slowly dying in drifter colonies scattered around the galaxy. It takes a miracle, the Titan project, for humanity to be given a new hope again.
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
And, fortunately, the hero’s MacBook Pro will use the same graphics card as the alien mothership, so we’ll display a jolly Roger on their screens right before we set off the nuke.
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
I forget the name of the TV series but there was a great show where aliens had occupied earth and the drones were just completely lethal and unstoppable. It was very realistic, the machines would just show up and instantly frag everyone in sight. The story was about a cop who ended up working for the alien occupiers, I wish I could remember the name of the show.
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 manipulation is Earth. Having missed that we developed a bunch of other technology which everyone else does not have.
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.
>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?
It stopped progress on other technologies because there was no need to develop them. They spent all their time expanding and attacking. I assumed that aliens didn’t develop science or industrialization. The story didn’t go into how they improved FTL or how was distraction.
“ That doesn't even make sense. Why would having simple gravity manipulation stop progress on the development of other technologies, particularly weapons?”
It’s kinda like asking - why have some of the world’s brightest minds spent the past 20 years trying to get people to watch more ads? What else might they have achieved or discovered instead?
Harry Turtledove also wrote a series of alternate history novels (called the world war series) based on a similar idea. In it, the aliens’ civilization progresses very slowly. A few centuries of human progress would take them millennia. They send a probe to earth in the middle ages, mark earth for an easy conquest, and show up during world war 2 where they find an almost evenly matched adversary. It’s pretty contrived, but an easy and amusing read.
I said the same to a conspiratorially minded friend today ... Like dude, if they're aliens who are capable of finding us and then _coming here_ they're not going to be getting shot down by the Air Force.
Just think of what kind of technological advancement it would take for _us_ to determine there was life on some planet, and then the subsequent advancement we'd need to actually send something there. And then, imagine actually bothering to do so, when you're at the level of technology that it would imply to have the ability.
> 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.
This, and I'd raise the bar even further: if we were to be attacked by any alien civilization, no matter if they have FTL or other Clarke tech or even if they have no special tech at all, we're incredibly f**ed.
It would be trivial to hurl asteroids at us until we're all dead. It would be trivial to engineer deadly pathogens, or to flood our planet with hunter-killer drones, or to roast the Earth with solar mirrors. And those are just the low tech options. We chose not to colonize the solar system, and thus we have no possible way of countering a civilization even if it was on the same developmental level as us.
Maybe we'd be able to mount a counter strike against one alien craft if they're unlucky and don't eradicate us outright. But that's a very big if.
However, I sleep well at night knowing that we have so far not seen anyone else out there, and we definitely have not seen a large space ship entering our system. Assuming they're bound to known physics, we'd definitely pick up their deceleration burn as they approach. If someone wants to eradicate us, a risk-free strategy would probably be to bombard us from outside the solar system.
The odd exception being, halflife (1/2)
Apparently those games have a ton of unused lore that actually does a realistic invasion scenario from a dyson-sphere level civilization.
So in that case, it was called the "7-hour war" for a reason.
No half life is very dumb. The aliens invade using largely small arms weapons. It is called the 7 hour war because a guy surrenders on behalf of earth after 7 hours.
If anyone imagines fighting alien invaders with small arms they’re already stupidly out of touch.
It doesn't have to be FTL capable after the crash. Just imagine, you with a rifle, an armor, a good sword and some grenades went back in time to say 20K yrs ago, for sure you are like God to the primitives for a moment but whence you exhausted the resources it's done business.
Same thing for aliens, imagine an alien refugee ship capable of FTL but needs a special fuel that it has to collect from deep Earth ocean very slowly, perhaps for a few million years because Earth only has very very few of such fuel. There is not much the refugees can do. They don't have weapons, they still habe to gather food and energy, they can't do a lot of bad things to locals (us)
That’s dumb sci fi logic though. Aliens don’t need deep ocean FTL fuel. If you can move matter at the speed of light, you have the capability to kill everything on earth very easily.
Anyone who's ever started pre-warp in a game of Distant Worlds: Universe[0] knows the hopelessness.
Pirates with FTL ships pop in, destroy your outer gas mining stations. You scramble your planetside navy, which begins to burn toward your system's equivalent of Jupiter. They'll be there in 4 months. In a matter of seconds, the pirates zip out beyond the Oort Cloud. Your navy are currently half-way between Earth and Jupiter, and, at that moment, the pirates pop-in next to your Earthside starport and have their way with your home base. You call your navy back, even as you know it'll make no difference.
(On the flip side, later, once you unlock warp and can zip across your star system in seconds, you feel like a god. Repeat with interstellar travel.)
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.
I want to read more comments like this, there seems to be a very clear trend to frame this like an alien invasion. It’s unnerving, even if it’s just click bait driving the narrative…
And if you do tell the truth your enemy has a nice cheap information gathering network at their disposal. Hell, they'll likely just make up their own bullshit and post it online anyway and say our government is lying.
Wow! I was just about to say they did the song in English as well, when your post sent me on a web crawl. I never realized that the English version is "censored"! The English version is relatively playful and only really references the worst in metaphor. Whereas the German version overtly describes the reality of war, and what motivates it.
This makes the Goldfinger cover (which is awesome) make all the more sense. At one point he starts singing in German and I always just assumed it was for style. In reality - he's singing the "real" song, and one of the most critical parts "censored" for the English version. This is what he's singing in German:
----
"Ninety-nine ministers of war
Matches and petrol cans (gasoline cans)
They regarded themselves as clever people
Already on the scent of fat quarry
They shouted "War" and wanted power
Man, who would have thought
That someday it would come as far as this
Because of ninety-nine balloons"
----
It's a shame he stops there since the German ending is also dramatically better, "Ninety-nine years of war. Left no place for victors. There are no longer any ministers of war. And also no jet fighters. Today I'm making my rounds. I see the world lying in ruins. I have found a balloon. I think of you and let it fly."
The English version ending speaks in metaphor and can even be interpreted to mean it might have just been a dream.
I'm fairly certain the Norwegian broadcasting service (NRK) usually plays the German version - but I might be misremembering. I suppose now would be the time to find out, given the news cycle - I'm sure some clever dj has dug it up...
CSI-like shows have spread the misconception that spy satellites can see human face sized objects in real-time. But there are certain physical limits that makes that unlikely to be done from space several hundreds of kilometers above the surface.
That is why spy satellites at much lower altitudes can be useful to spy on other countries. However anything below 100 km is considered an intrusion into the sovereign airspace of a country.
Have you ever seen the budget for the department of defense? Whatever they're doing here is less than the pocket change they lose in the Pentagon seat cushions.
Also, pilots generally need to fire a certain number of missiles every year just to stay in training. At least this saves the additional cost of a drone (the usual target for training missions, I think).
The USAF has purchased more than 10,000 of the AIM-9X model alone (not counting the other operators, domestic and foreign, and not counting all the other variants of the Sidewinder, the basic model of which has been in service since the 1950s).
I don’t understand these “missiles cost too much” budget arguments. Defense costs hundreds of billions annually. The cost of the people who orchestrate the firing of that munition vastly outweighs the cost of the munition.
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 very welcome
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.
Random question - anyone know how a sidewinder missile hits these objects (whatever they are)? My missile knowledge is non-existent but movies show me it has something to do with heat signature - which these don’t seem to have.
The AIM-9X is infrared imaging based rather than heat signature based. The pilot resolves that contrast between the object and sky before firing the missile and missile targets the object based on the image.
Do you know what sets it off? Seems like it wouldn't be from impact as these balloon materials couldn't be comparable to say hitting another plane, right?
A little research on the Canadian Ballon shootdown a number of years back show that isn't exactly the case. A larger balloon was shot with a (20mm I believe) cannon and continued to float a long distance.
‘Duds’ is an odd way of putting it. Sidewinders usually have an ‘exploding ring of metal rod’ warhead, I believe - and that was replaced by something else better suited to destroying the balloon while leaving the payload intact enough for technical analysis.
All modern missiles use a proximity fuse that selects the optimum position relative to the target to detonate, it isn't based on contact. One thing to consider is that the warhead is not in the nose -- that is where the sensors are -- but further back on the missile. These warheads often us an annular (ring-like) blast pattern, hence why positioning and orientation relative to the target at detonation time is important to maximize damage.
Adding to janderwogs response, air intercept missiles don't really deal damage with the explosion. The missiles are built with shrapnel payloads propelled by the explosion. These are what actually damage the aircraft on the receiving end.
Yes warm bodies put off infrared, but so does the sun, and the suns IR rays are reflected by objects just as they are in the visible range. These reflections used for imaging
Cloudless sky is cold, and at 30,000 feet extremely cold. Anything not-sky is going to contrast against the sky, even if it has no internal heat source (and remember: if it has electric things in it, it produces heat).
The missiles seek and track based on heat differences. To an IR sensor the sky is typically pretty "cold" and just about anything in the sky is relatively "hot". Once the missile is locked onto the relatively hot signature against the cold background the sensor stares at it and adjusts the missile's trajectory to intercept it (and blow up).
Countermeasures like flares try to trick a missile's sensor into thinking the hot object it was staring at was the flare going that way and not the maneuvering aircraft going the other way. Modern IR tracking missiles try to stay locked on the object by ignoring hotter or cooler objects that might end up in its view.
At FL400+, anything not the earth is basically space – if you point an IR camera in the sky outwards, it really does look very cold as the pressure is basically zero and scattered IR photons are few and far between. Objects that are not vacuum have a signature in the IR – both a black-body temperature (which, even at ~ -55 ºC, is a hell of a lot higher than single-digit kelvin…) and possibly the opportunity to reflect any incident light.
Some modern imaging-based guidance packages for anti-aircraft missiles use multiple spectra to defeat countermeasures like flares. While a flare and a plane sometimes look similar in IR, they are easy to discriminate in the UV spectrum.
Not much is known of the AIM-9X but it is probably similar to the AIM-9L.
The AIM-9L doesn't lock on to the hottest thing, it takes an IR picture of the scene and follows the targeted "blob" in the image that's generated. Additionally it has laser proximity fusing so it knows when it is close to the shape it is tracking. By not simply picking the hottest thing in a scene you can't hide in front of the sun anymore, and the effectiveness of flares is reduced.
The only thing needed to generate a "blob" good enough to target is sufficient ΔT between the scene and the targeted object.
The objects, and they have been curiously consistent with calling them "objects", definitely have sufficient ΔT compared to the background sky if they are made of any solid material that has been exposed to sunlight for any period of time.
Well it goes real noisy like NEERRRRRERERRRRRERRRRERRRRwarblewarblewarble and something gets hit. I thought it knew where it wasn't but that's the Tomahawk. The Sidewinder just knows where thing is.
That's the extent of my knowledge about the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
All puns aside, we've been demanding answers since they let the first one drift across North America. I'm not holding my breath on getting those answers, though.
> All puns aside, we've been demanding answers since they let the first one drift across North America. I'm not holding my breath on getting those answers, though.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Because we're starting to get those answers.
There has been (and that was just last week), an open Senate committee hearing[0] with DoD officials about the balloon, a classified briefing about same and a press briefing[1] by Senators after the classified hearing.
I watched the Senate hearing and got lots of good information, with even more info gleaned from stuff alluded to and teased to the Senators for the classified hearing.
With much more to come once the House comes back into session I'm sure.
Which has been taken off the front page remarkably quickly, given its large number of votes in a short time.
Perhaps there’s some system where downvotes encourage a post to be taken off the front page quicker. But I suspect moderator involvement. Which is misguided if so: people will simply post dupes and continue to upvote them. Thus, the story is still on the front-page, but in a fragmented manner.
But it’s surprising just how much information we do have. What reason did the military have (both US and Canadian) to leak info about the shape of the objects?
Likely the former because NORAD has made some statements about disabling filters on their radar data processing software that would have previously classified these as noise, effectively rendering them invisible.
Probably the best stealth there is: to be classed as noise.
As per usual, these things are flashy and attention grabbing, but not really relevant in the grand scheme of things. It's microplastics, fertilizer runoff, and CO2 that's killing the world, not train crashes that happen once or twice a decade.
They lit some hazmat containers on fire a week ago to prevent an explosion. It's long since de-escalated.
I guess people are focusing on it because anyone that counters them ends up looking like they are trying to minimize a rather calamitous event.
Like burning off the vinyl chloride monomer is going to produce quite a lot of gnarly stuff like hydrogen chloride (which turns into hydrochloric acid when in solution with water), but there hasn't been any information produced that indicates that there will actually be a persistent problem stemming from it (at least, relative to the emissions environment that exists).
Just ask an Ohioan where the come from and they're likely to say "Pennsyltucky" (Pennsylvania and Kentucky being eastern and western border states to Ohio), to obfuscate the existence of their severe danger zone![0]
[0] cf. Poe's Law, as this note serves as a "clear indicator" of my parody.
The PRC reminds me of a lot of youtube videos I have seen: There's one or more young men who are enjoying the fuck around portion of the evening who then discover how fast it can turn into the find out portion of the evening.
I was going to say something about this being a ridiculous reason for conflict, but then again the US does have a history of starting wars over fantasies and fabrications. So consider curbing your moronic jingoistic attitude.
I think you are missing the humorous tone of the comment you are replying to. There is also some speculation that Xi might have approved this project in principle a while back, but due to the size of the Chinese bureaucracy it has since gone into autonomous operation, and the people nominally in charge of it are going to be carpeted to account for the headache they've created for the boss.
Not to be conspiratorial, but if it is an intentional distraction, the balance of probabilities favors the misdirection coming from the US (whether media, politicians, etc). This still feels like a case of seeing more because we've been told to pay attention to it, vs a new phenomenon. Let's see
> I sure hope this isn’t a distraction to get us to look up while something goes down under the sea.
The resources (including “human resources”) we use to check the sky are not the same resources used to track undersea threats. If anything, an elevated general state of alert from probing in the one domain makes it more, not less, likely than any intrusion in the other would be detected.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 380 ms ] threadWhy FTL? or any of the things you list. We are already looking to fly tiny probes past alien exoplanets with Breakthrough Starshot.
If you can get balloons into earth safely, you can also just pelt the planet with big chunks of metal at speeds more deadly than nuclear explosions.
Maybe the UFOs were built to withstand alpha-gamma-laser-magma-pulse rays, not our primitive projectile based weaponry!
A premise I was skeptical with but utterly fell in love with once I read it.
[1] https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
—Thor, Stargate SG-1, “Small Victories”
The air defense folks increased the sensitivity of radars and started finding the UFOs. Maybe the UFOs were keeping away from population areas and radars but now were being picked up.
It is strange that the objects aren't stealthed. Which makes sense for balloon payload. But stealth, hovering, car-sized objects should be hard to detect. Maybe aliens don't know about stealth. The other weird thing is that they just hover. For advanced or alien technology, I would expect them to move away or dodge.
https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162414986417840128...
Also that we are seeing a lot more now because we have turned down/off the filters on the radars. Which means also we can expect a lot more false positives.
https://twitter.com/aviation_intel/status/162461466198661120...
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23733/spacex-exec-says...
Perhaps we can, but clearly we can expect to find actual UAVs corresponding to these radar signals.
If these UAVs that have been shot down were domestic research balloons or some other aircraft exempt from FAA regulation, then we can expect a party to come forward and publicly acknowledge ownership/control of the UAV.
However, based on the descriptions of the object over Alaska it seems very likely there are indeed unmanned drones being operated by foreign governments and not domestic weather/research balloons or FAA compliant unregistered domestic aircraft.
Keep in mind that not only US or Canada launches weather balloons. These things are well capable of flying huge distances, including across the oceans. There has been one launched by amateur radio operators a few years ago that has circumnavigated the globe - and that's not at all a rare feat.
See e.g.:
https://qrp-labs.com/circumnavigators.html
So no need to go all conspirationalist about "unmanned drones operated by foreign governments" just yet. Especially given the distances and altitudes these things were found flying at - a heavier than air device would need a ton of fuel and energy to fly that high and that far, so a "drone" that at the same time doesn't look like an aircraft is rather unlikely.
It is not a tinfoil hat theory to point out that a balloon that is not playing by weather balloon rules is not a weather balloon. Route planning hasn't suddenly gotten more difficult in the past week.
https://youtu.be/P43wVDiZs8k
The only new aspect is that you are being told about it. Which is unfortunately probably not a good sign. At best it will be only used to justify the purchase of some expensive "hi tech" boondoggle to counter these... balloons.
This may be true, but it's awful hard to get visual confirmation and then shoot down a false positive.
This whole thing is just genius on so many levels. Exploit the stigma about aliens by constructing small drones and make them appear wacky beyond belief to guarantee they'll go unreported. Exploit the radar filters for small and slow moving craft with motionless soft balloons. And it worked brilliantly.
> I believe that those in power who snicker about credible reports of strange objects in the sky and stymie research into them, including access to classified data, have become a threat to national security themselves. Their lack of imagination, curiosity, and creativity appears to have built a near-perfect vacuum that our enemies could exploit and likely have exploited to an astonishing degree.
That's easy to say, but does anyone know how many objects appear when you drop the filter? Yes, the military has a huge budget, but it's not unlimited. My guess is when you lower the filter you're met with so many objects that you couldn't possibly address them all with the resources you have available.
Imagine you have 10 resources to deploy and a screen with 100 objects to investigate. You lower the filter and there are now a million objects to investigate. It's not hard to understand why the filters were in place and saying they were "asleep" is silly. There have probably been people at the DoD asking for more resources ($) to remove the filters for years.
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
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
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 justify all manner of immoral actions by the US government over the decades that I have no sympathy for that argument at all
>>Why do citizens need to know detailed specs of IR optics systems installed on fighter jets?
because we paid for it, because we own it, because we can not accurately hold elected government to account for their actions if we do not know what they actions really are. We have no idea what they are shooting down. Maybe it some private plane of of political enemy, maybe is a Alien Drone, maybe is some weather balloon, maybe is a Chinese Spy Drone......
We only have their word... and their word means nothing to me
This is the same reason all cops should be required to wear body cams and make the video public
It is non-sense
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Epsilon
(/s, if that was necessary to clarify)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_balloon
>Between 900 and 1,300 locations around the globe do routine releases, two or four times daily.
On the other hand, weather balloons are not silver-gray and cylindrical. A Google image search shows them almost always white and spherical to teardrop shape and pretty much unmistakably a balloon.
Not to say one of these can't be a weather balloon, but I would expect these also are known possibilities / somewhat detectable / aren't trying to be sneaky ...
We did a balloon launch a long time ago, it had a radio sending back telemetry and we chased it across Colorado scrub land hundreds of miles.
https://www.overlookhorizon.com/how-to-launch-weather-balloo...
Wooden and fiberglass boats are fairly invisible to radar, even with metal masts and rigging. If you are ever planning to head out into the ocean and near where you might expect commercial shipping, these are a cheap safety item for making your boat visible.
It is now 8 years since I worked with it last time and 1000m2 sounds very large to me but that is the only number that pops into my head.
So yes, if you are in a small boat, use a radar reflector and also be alert.
Not required in the US, but not a bad idea to hoist one in fog.
Although these days, an AIS transmitter is a better answer. But a prudent mariner never trusts a single point of failure, so might as well do both.
Admittedly I don't always hoist the radar reflector in the heavy fog near the Golden Gate bridge, but I always transmit AIS in low visibility (and monitor it).
So it is possible that trigger-happy NORAD is shooting down a lot of perfectly harmless stuff now.
There are large scientific balloons. I couldn't find any standards of large balloons using transponders. They have communications and tracking so location is known. I wonder if NORAD is in contact with all the organizations about their balloons.
I suspect there will be move to put ADS-B on larger balloons.
Are the electronics in these balloons recovered eventually? Or is it just basically e-waste?
Not only did our balloon have the parachute and radar reflector, we also put blinking lights on it. Since there was no transmitter on it, I had to call 2 different phone numbers to give status updates to report anticipated altitude progress. The first was the regional airport, and the second number was the larger airport 2 hours away that we were in the line of their approach pattern. The first airport would then notify the closer joint air base that they did not feel like we needed to call directly. At one point, we lost contact with our cheap GPS because it reached altitudes beyond what the company anticipated civilians to be doing. ATC informed us they were tracking it, and we were a little off in our altitude estimates within 5000'.
All of that to say, no, it was not e-waste. we got it all back minus the bits of the balloon that exploded into pieces no longer attached.
[0]https://www.stratoflights.com/en/tutorial/weather-balloon-to...
https://www.outlookindia.com/national/drones-may-replace-wea...
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/Starshield_(satellite_constellati...
Idk how many companies/govs have this capability but: https://www.palantir.com/offerings/metaconstellation/
CubeSats are cheap and effective.
Because to achieve that you need to put a lot of stuff in orbit and the only way to affordably do that is cheap (reusable) launches.
They did what now?
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 payloads into space.[7]
In fact, setting up as much automation as possible, pre-people, would be a good way to establish the human safety of Mars flights.
As well as supercharging the productivity and quality of life of the first Marsers when they finally do arrive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnepr_(rocket)
But for your question, with LEO satellites you don't really target specific countries. They cover every country within a given latitude range. A round LEO orbit that goes over the US must also go over China.
However you don't need geostationary orbits to target a given part of the globe. Molniya orbits do the same thing more or less and work better if you want coverage further away from the equator. They were popularized by the USSR and the US and China use them to varying extents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit
I wouldn't expect to see spy satellites from the SDA; the NRO has always controlled those. I could believe small spy satellites if launched from NRO. There haven't been any details on how missile defense will work from space with small satellites. The descriptions I've seen have been about communication and detecting hypersonic weapons with infrared sensors. The latter is not what I would think of as spy satellite or missile defense.
The US government knows exactly what is going on up there at all times and most likely has the most advanced spying satellites and capabilities out of all countries.
The NRO has been doing this since the 60s!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office
>In 2012 the agency donated two space telescopes to NASA. Despite being stored unused, the instruments are superior to the Hubble Space Telescope.
I had a retired intel guy at DEFCON tell me the imagery is so advanced they could zoom in on a coin on the ground and tell if it was heads or tails.
Assuming a great number of things, a larger than Hubble 3 meter aperture, 200km orbit, red 750nm light, zero atmospheric distortion, the resolving power cannot be better than 6.1 centimeter resolution.
tan(750e-9/31.22)200000
= 0.061
If you want the best possible example of NRO's capabilities, the best example in recent memory is when trump unintentionally disclosed them with the highest resolution satellite image I personally have ever seen [2]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution
[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/05/758038714/can-president-trump...
Some hardware failure happens, but it's not that frequent, if it's like previous generations of cell technology, most of it will run until the operator chooses to shut down that particular service e.g. switching to a newer generation and freeing up the spectrum for it.
Or was it a joke I'm not American enough to understand?
US can always launch more and for these LEO constellations it's all about numbers.
2. These gaps would be measured in minutes, and are zero when you considered the combined coverage of all none-nato countries. Anything that we don't want seen is done under cover.
1. Some reports say that they've only been detected recently; referencing multiple undetected occurrences during the Trump presidency; o they've been working for X years already. If they're undetected, they can view into gaps referenced above. If this program has been going on for 5-10 years undetected then it still could have been of value to China/Russia/Whoever owns them.
China has a total of 600-ish satellites together for all purposes. Starlink has 3500-ish right now, and the already licensed plans are for 12000 by 2026. When(if!) Starship starts launching satellites, a single launch can put in orbit more military satellites than China has ever launched, and it does not seem have a comparable capability in the near future.
Like knowing what kinds of alloys turned out not to work and why, etc. So you don't have to repeat all that.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00048-7#:~:text=1.....
If they wanted low key interception of civilian terrestrial radio signals, seems like it would be better to just rent a Uhaul or RV, load it up with radio gear, and drive it across the country.
UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters. Nothing more nothing less. I have no idea why people expect UN to take action, when UN is explicitly not an organisation for taking any actions.
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:
"Consider a small sample of heinous cases: in April 2016 Foreign Policy reported that, in the Central African Republic, a French commander tied up four girls and forced them to have sex with a dog. Soldiers from France, Gabon, and Burundi sexually abused at least 108 women and children in a single province. In July 2015, The Washington Post reported that peacekeepers in Haiti engaged in ‘transactional sex’ with over 229 women and girls in exchange for food, medicine, or other necessities.
"Most recently, it was published in the The Washington Post in February 2016 that ‘four peacekeepers had allegedly paid girls as young as 13 as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex in a different camp for the internally displaced’ and ‘as many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomised six boys ages nine to 15’."
https://www.ibanet.org/article/CEBC5F69-A238-49BB-B85A-5E8D8...
I'm guessing if one lived in any of the areas mentioned above, the UN would feel about as much like an invading force as just about anything.
The UN as a peacekeeping force was a great concept, but it's had a very mixed history when put into practice.
But it exists, so many people expect it to be a solution to their problems.
First, I don't think calling them "blue helmets" has the negative connotation you think it does.
Second. What's the difference between the UN peacekeepers and any other army? All have a mixed history and I'm pretty sure have let's say a high amount of immunity.
People do bad things, especially soldiers who have power and the cover of war. This will never change. Of course crimes should be prosecuted as well but I don't know much about the details of the UN peacekeepers.
Their Rules of Engagement are also significantly different from those of a conventional military force.
The International Court of Justice (the IJC–not the ICC) is part of the United Nations System. At that body, at least, UN peacekeepers enjoy blanket immunity. To oversimplify it, it's another case of, "we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
The UN nominally expects host countries to prosecute the war crimes of their peacekeepers, but in reality the nature of deploying to somewhere needing peacekeepers is that the rule of law on the ground is already minimal, at best. So there's no real enforcement mechanism to prosecute these crimes.
It is not a trivial distinction. One can debate their virtue and utility value one way or the other, but the distinction is real and significant. They operate under a unique set of circumstances and saying war is hell and victors typically enjoy their own brand of immunity is true enough, but not entirely applicable here.
The legal framework surrounding UN peacekeeping is insufficient as the UN itself grants its peacekeepers blanket immunity, and expects host and/or contributing nations to prosecute war crimes committed by UN peacekeepers. But those nations are almost by definition unable to maintain the rule of law (or in the case of contributing nations, unlikely or unwilling to prosecute).
I'm not sure why "but other people also do bad stuff" is where everyone seems to go with that information. But to go along it, a more apt comparison would be the Mahmudiyah rape and killings: war crimes committed by US troops in Iraq, in which the perpetrators were tried, convicted and sentenced in American military and civilian courts. That's how that aspect of the inevitable evils of war should be handled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings
Had the perpetrators been UN peacekeepers, the host nation likely would not have had the ability to prosecute the accused competently and fairly, and the UN would have given them immunity if expected to act. The contributing nation would not have wanted to prosecute for a whole host of reasons.
One can argue that the UN is doing what it can, but it isn't much: Asking contributing nations to prosecute war crimes committed by their citizens (not likely), shaming those nations [1], and trying to support the victims [2]. Which all goes to show that the UN is rather toothless on the matter. There's an asymmetry to their ability to contribute to violence but not prosecute the criminal abuses thereof. I think that's concerning.
Regardless, your comparison reminds me that even Abu Ghraib resulted in numerous prison terms. Make of that what you will.
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/01/521142
[2] https://conduct.unmissions.org/remedial-trust-fund
Since this is HN I might as well provide the data:
In total 11 soldiers were convicted, of which 9 served time in prison:
- Former Spc. Armin Cruz - 8 months
- Former Sgt. Javal Davis - 6 months
- Pfc. Lynndie England - 3 years (released after 1 year and 5 months)
- Former Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick - 8½ years (released on parole after 4 years)
- Former Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. - 10 years (paroled after 6 and a half years)
- Former Spc. Sabrina Harman - 6 months
- Former Spc. Roman Krol - 10 months
- Former Spc. Jeremy Sivits - 1 year
- Former Sgt. Michael J. Smith - 179 days
And the two who served no prison time were:
- Former Sgt. Santos A. Cardona - 90 days of hard labor
- Former Spc. Megan Ambuhl Graner - Discharged from the army without prison time
We all know US will declare war on Belgium IIRC if international court of justice will ever sentence any US soldier, all pretty unique scenarios.
Blue helmets may not all be saints, but they did and do some important security work in semi-failed states ie in Africa where otherwise gangs would chop civilians from other tribes if left unchecked. Also kept Balcan states more stable after war. You are simply choosing to not see forest for the trees for whatever personal reasons.
The vast majority of the damage done by a war is not in massacres, or isolated incidents, but rather in the normal practice of warfare: attacks upon infrastructure, collateral damage, blockades and sanctions. These are the drivers that send life expectancy plummeting, and the idea that you can 'clean' war by avoiding some forms of violence, generally selected for symbolic reasons, is absurd.
So in the case of the UN, the reason why it's a good model is that the UN is unlikely to engage in wars of aggression, so even if the conduct of its soldiers are awful, they are ultimately less problematic than a national military.
Even the Nosiour square massacre in 2007, which was a particularly atrocious, and not conducted by a military personnel, took a whole year to file charges (despite overwhelming evidence) found five Blackwater soldiers guilty, but had the charges dropped on technicality in 2009 (despite taking a whole year in preparing the charges). Now later rulings found this was an error, and four of them were finally charged with the massacre 2014 (seven years after the massacre). Charges were as such:
- Dustin Heard - 12½ years in prison
- Evan Liberty - 14 years in prison
- Nicholas Slatten - Life without the possibility of parole
- Paul Slough - 15 years in prison
Additionally Jeremy Ridgeway got 1 year and 1 day in prison in a special deal by pleading guilty and testifying against the other.
Predictably all four (not Ridgeway) were then pardoned by Trump in 2020.
This is a clear case of the US justice system not actually wanting to press these charges, and only did so reluctantly after an immense pressure from the electorate.
If you also compare the Nisour Square Massacre to the helicopter murders of journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh (as leaked by Chelsea Manning). The only people that answered for those murders were Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, and that was only for revealing the truth about those murders.
Nuclear powers play by whatever rules they choose to play by.
In fairness to the UN, it's not an easy problem to solve: who's going to volunteer to act as a peacekeeper in a place where if the wrong faction ultimately prevails, you will be subject to the local jurisdiction and all of the corruption that may entail? Unlike military service, UN peacekeepers do not have the same degree of national backing to rely on when things go south.
https://justsecurity.org
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.
Maybe it depends if you're a UN member with a veto or not. It's possible that having a veto changes how one would perceive and interact with the UN.
I can cite henious cases committed by London Police force. Just a couple months ago we've convicted 'bastard dave'. He was a cop and used his position to become a serial rapist and a murderer, and he had a nickname, which strongly suggests some of his colleagues knew something.
You have to assess three points to understand if the entire organisation is responsoble.
Have they commited significantly more warcrimes, than comparable situation suggests is, dreadfull to say, normal? Say during occupation of Iraq? For blue helmets I mean, I hope London police do not think of themselves that way.
Can these acts be traced back to some higher level of command, that is either turning a blind eye or is actively encouraging them?
When these acts become known, are the perpetrators punished, or are these acts tolerated?
I have not studied history of blue helmets, but these are the kind of questions you should be seeking to answer.
The rest is a different conversation.
That's atrocious
I used to be in the 82nd Airborne and the inevitable problems when they got sent on peacekeeping missions in the 90s was no big surprise at all.
While it was a particularly poor showing for a UN mission, and badly handled at every possible level, I don't think it's comparable raping children. It wasn't the UN soldiers who murdered the civilians, they were just completely unable to prevent it, and provided only an illusion of defense.
If anything, the doves are way to often the pets of the butcher.
The UN courts can issue judgements…
Human Rights Courts: e.g. Slobodan Milosovic, Radavan Kardzich etc
A lot of the global treaties are kicked around there
They also enforce peace zones (poorly) like Lebanon, Israel demilitarised zone.
They coordinate aid programs UNRWA etc
UN decisions are more like a veil or facade of moral Authority
Ignorant, cynical claims on the the Internet do a lot of harm to real people, by tearing down valuable things that people need.
Not so; "veil" or "facade" implies fakeness or concealment. The U.N. does not hide its mission or its position on human rights.
> One of the great achievements of the United Nations is the creation of a comprehensive body of human rights law—a universal and internationally protected code to which all nations can subscribe and all people aspire. The United Nations has defined a broad range of internationally accepted rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. It has also established mechanisms to promote and protect these rights and to assist states in carrying out their responsibilities. [1]
The lack of consensus and consistency is an ongoing challenge, sure, but it doesn't make the goals fake. Countries are flawed and have competing interests, but it is important to nudge the world in a better direction.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/human-rights
It's all to appease the major powers to not use their nukes.
To a degree, it also gives the lesser players a voice to feel heard so that they continue to participate in the economic system that benefits the big players. Again, this keeps the big players from acting unilaterally, imperialistically, etc. in a way that threatens the use of nukes.
A side benefit is that this lets the bigger players test their geopolitical strategies without dangerous surprises. If tensions can be expressed and gently eased into a final state, that prevents a flash bang.
It's kept us from having another world war. Or nuclear exchange. Here's hoping we keep it up.
Why are you and the other GP asking about individual contributions? Isn't that more than enough to be irritated with their existence or capacities? $150/year is a significant amount that I'd definitely rather not pay.
This is based on one estimate that 1.2% of the federal budget was for the UN. Another estimate says 11.2b in 2020, when the federal budget was 4.79t. That estimate knocks my contribution significantly lower (anywhere from $10-40).
Curiosity for me!
Out of (further) curiosity, what makes a post on this website “unnecessary” vs (I’m assuming) “necessary”?
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter
"Americans could envision the Soviet Union joining the United States in policing the peace in the brighter new world that would arise from the carnage [of WW2]" (page 2)
"The Soviet ambassador... was even stronger than the others in pleading for a security council with teeth" (page 9)
"Chopping the air with his hands to emphasize his words, Truman said the new UN must keep the world 'free from the fear of war'." (page 19)
More generally the ongoing theme of the book is the extent to which the UN has been successful, and unsuccessful, at ensuring world peace in various conflicts that have flared since its founding.
I did get the impression that not a lot of thought was put into the design of the UN, and there is the possibility that it could've been much more successful with a radically different design.
[Edit: To be more concrete -- Google tells me that global military spending was $2.1 trillion in 2021. You'd think it would be worth putting a mere 1% of that $2.1 trillion, something like $21 billion, into essay competitions, agent-based simulations, online diplomacy games, academic literature reviews, etc. in order to design an optimal UN structure that minimizes the risk of war. But the actual structure of the UN was designed using far, far less than $21 billion worth of analysis, based on what I recall from the Meisler book.]
That's not to say that the UN being a forum is bad or unnecessary. But it's interesting to me how everyone seems to have forgotten its original eutopian aspiration to create a world free from war. Maybe has something to do with the fact that people who lived through WW2 are mostly dead now, and few living people understand at a visceral level how horrifying war between great powers really is.
It's worth thinking about this context when considering the Korean War when it was UNC (UN Command) that was the primary defense force: https://www.unc.mil/History/1950-1953-Korean-War-Active-Conf...
I think it is maybe only after the Iraq War that people stopped thinking of the UN as an alternative to conventional war politics. IIRC, Bush acted unilaterally without UN approval, and now it kinda seems like the "you should get UN approval before making war" norm has been lost? I don't remember anyone even discussing the possibility of UN approval for any more recent US military actions like in Libya. And the UN hasn't played a large role in Ukraine either -- I suppose that might be because Russia is on the security council?
Article 43 of the UN Charter would, if it were ever implemented, create a military force under the control of the UN Security Council.
>The potential of the United Nations and its Charter remained a dominant subject in schools and communities into the 1950s, focused especially on those Charter promises to protect member states "against violators of the peace." Chapter VII dealt with enforcement action: Article 39 first authorized the Security Council to "determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression"; Article 42 was designed to respond with "air, sea or land forces as may be necessary"; and Article 43 committed all UN member states "to make available to the Security Council, on its call, armed forces, assistance, facilities, including rights of passage necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security." Although much hope for the future was placed in the ratification of Article 43, it was never implemented.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA514849456&sid=sitemap...
The UN also handles much more than military missions, including health, technical coordination, and much more.
I'm sure you could dredge up some connection to the US and get angry with us about it, if you were an Islamic extremist or something. More realistically though, you could find fault with any country with that attitude.
Speaking of current geopolitics instead of historical, the recent blame for causing a rise in aggression lies firmly with Russia and China. The US is not blameless but neither are they starting any new wars in almost two decades.
So, tell me again about why everything is the fault of "The West", including all the western countries who have never attacked anyone, in your mind?
Ignoring the ongoing interventions in foreign conflicts [3][4], US Foreign Policy has been absolutely _disastrous_ for a number of countries around the world. From the perspective of the US Govt, this may be fine though I would argue that the real effects from destabilization and strained bilateral relations are simply accumulating. Happy to provide citations for multiple blunders in the last 3 decades. It is not surprising that many countries in the global south now see China|Russia|India as better bilateral partners.
Devolving critique to simply originating from "if you were an Islamic extremist of something" is very reductive and I would implore you to read more about global politics from different national perspectives.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in_I...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-led_intervention_in_t...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_intervention_in_Libya...
Not the person you're responding to, but I think it is important to recognize that the US is practically the military of The West (and some more like Japan and Korea), or rather those on the side of democracy in the cold war. Lots of this is because after a bunch of very big wars in Europe (Napoleonic Wars, WWI, WWII) -- and a bunch of smaller wars -- the countries essentially decided that it was best to have smaller militaries and out source it to somewhere that didn't have a long history of border disputes. Helped that the US already had a strong military, were an ocean away, and their bordering neighbors aren't major competitors. On the flip side, the USSR was essentially this same thing but for the communist side (till China started to rise in power). Some military historians suggest that the rise of super powers was a big component for the long peace. There's a lot to this history that's way more complicated than can be put in a singular comment and involves much more of the globe than just Europe (even the US's, Mexico's, and Canada's independences rely and exacerbated on these conflicts). People use this history to write a wide variety of narratives.
Long Peace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace
Borders in Europe from 1000AD to now: https://youtu.be/UY9P0QSxlnI?t=409
I find it untrue. Real peace can only be without weapons. I don't want to go back to this same old rhetoric I grew up with and which I was happy to have ended, until 9/11 and the US making a 180° turn, because now they had no one to counter their ambitions to dominate the world, which doesn't validate the rhetoric, because obviously only 1 side laid down their weapons. The US saw this as "we won, now we can act unrestricted". But Russia didn't lose. They willingly stopped the cold war. That is very important in understanding the current aggression and narrative.
I'd love to live in a world without weapons, but I don't see how such a thing is even possible, from multiple angles. If that's not possible, then it is about how to minimize fighting and lives lost. After all, that is why we'd want no weapons. That solution space is rather complex and likely non-convex.
The German Bundeswehr is a joke to the point where it is even unable to defend its own country and no German politician in charge of the military has ever felt like that is a problem worthy of attention for more than half a century.
You've lost credibility completely with this sentence. While I'd agree that many news outlets have their biases, some hugely so, saying everything they say is a lie is just categorically wrong.
Many news outlets like Reuters and the PA have business models based around factual reporting for others.
From what I could find, Reuters wrote 3 articles on the topic of war crimes committed by Australian forces, with a very balanced and careful tone [1], and at least 8 articles on the tweet, consistently calling the caricature a "fake image" while not even showing the picture. Not only is there an obvious association between "fake image" and "fake news", apparently twitter drama was also deemed more important than the actual investigation into war crimes.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8999917/China-attac...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-defence/austral...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-china/australia...
A balloon could also be in the way for airplanes. A balloon could also drop its payload, on purpose or by accident. The recent balloons have been reported to carry a load the size of up to several buses so I guess if that falls to ground it could cause quite some damage.
Not sure satellites can shoot missiles or drop bombs that could hit earth in any effective manner.
Otherwise (for example) the Apollo missions would have violated USSR's airspace whenever the moon's orbit was above it's territory, which would make space unusable for everyone.
So yes, Ballons are by definition in airspace because they use lighter than air buoyancy to rise and sattelites do not.
Check your source, per your cited wiki page: > The shootdown, and the subsequent creation of a record-setting amount of in-orbit debris, drew serious international criticism.[15][16][17][18][19]
The shootdown refers to the ASAT test on FY-1C
For the reference [15] http://www.centerforspace.com/asat/, cannot be opened, the site is unreachable.
For [16] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17497766 It's referring to a debris from Russia rocket, itself is a routine affair in the space. > The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) briefly took refuge in escape capsules as a piece of space junk hurtled by. > The debris - a discarded piece of Russian rocket - was detected on Friday when it was too late to move the ISS.
For reference [17], a piece from BCC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6276543.stm BCC's reporting on China is about as accurate as Fox's reporting on Democratic party. Go figure
For reference [18], an intro page on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_France-Presse AFP Not sure what's relevance with a ASAT
For reference [19], https://www.npr.org/2007/01/19/6923805/chinese-missile-destr... > The governments of Britain, Japan and Australia are voicing concern over China's apparent test of an anti-satellite missile. The United States says China shot down one of its own aging weather satellites last week, in a kind of target practice in low Earth orbit. > "I was surprised that they were able to do it," Kristensen says. Seems about routine as any space tests...
Then the conclusion is that China's ASAT test is "the worst in history." With evidences that are as substantial as web3's value to society.
This type of post on HN is simply not passing the quality bar on HN...
> The single biggest debris-generating event happened in 2007, when China used a missile to destroy one of its own satellites. The explosion created more than 3,000 trackable objects and an estimated 150,000 debris particles.
Also, comparing the BBC to Fox on coverage of anything is disingenuous at best. Even if they have clear biases, the BBC is one of the most respected news outlets in the world, and have been very rarely just lying about facts.
Edit: also, reference 15 includes an archive link, so the fact that it is currently unreachable is entirely irrelevant. Here is a sample from the archive link you misleadingly ignored:
> The official debris count from China’s anti-satellite missile test has reached 1,337 pieces big enough to be tracked and NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office is estimating more than 35,000 pieces larger than 1 cm [...] This makes the January 11 test the largest debris-generating event in history, surpassing the previous record set in 1996, according to Dr. T.S. Kelso. Dr. Kelso serves as Senior Research Astrodynamicist in the Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI) and webmaster of CelesTrak, a site dedicated to tracking space objects and monitoring them for in-orbit collisions.
Are your brain's logical circuit working correctly?
Right, that's why we should only ever trust Radio Free Asia for our news sources about what's happening internationally
Here is the submitted flight plan https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481
https://x.company/projects/loon/
Rather than being all secretive, it would be just as easy to blame some new upstart company being a little more cavalier than Google.
Much more likely sounding/meteorological balloons - a lot of those are sent up every day, worldwide, with payloads that are roughly cylindrical in shape. And some of them can traverse huge distances, even across oceans, so such "UFO" doesn't need to originate locally at all.
A strong jet stream can exceed 250mph.
https://twitter.com/markp8183/status/1546936037112393728
EDIT: To give a more clear example. It took XL-Calibur a little more then 30 hour to travel from Hudson Bay to Yellowknife. That is not much shorter then some distance between Montana and Huron
My suspicion is that the descriptions have been of the payloads. They sound like balloon payloads. Maybe the balloon is low visibility. But doesn't explain why government doesn't mention balloons.
The outside possibility that isn't aliens is anti-gravity. I would strange that anyone who developed anti-gravity would keep secret and use it like this.
The first balloon didn’t have this consideration because it could be seen from the ground.
Your enemy only needs to be slightly better than your capabilities to beat you. If they can judge it accurately, they can more efficiently spend resources to counter your ability. If they misjudge, they either waste a ton of time and money, or they end up outmatched.
It’s like a game of poker. Those who are good at strategically releasing partial information are at an advantage.
So they call it an object because that's what they know.
Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...
Most dolphins are smaller than a compact car, but I bet they would break apart upon impact with a frozen sea after dropping out of the sky. This might be the correct answer.
There’s something hilarious about the idea that, if this was the start of an alien invasion, our journalists and politicians started off the coverage not being curious about what on Earth these objects were, but instead slinging political slime at each other
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.
The one civilization that somehow missed gravity manipulation is Earth. Having missed that we developed a bunch of other technology which everyone else does not have.
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?
It’s kinda like asking - why have some of the world’s brightest minds spent the past 20 years trying to get people to watch more ads? What else might they have achieved or discovered instead?
Just think of what kind of technological advancement it would take for _us_ to determine there was life on some planet, and then the subsequent advancement we'd need to actually send something there. And then, imagine actually bothering to do so, when you're at the level of technology that it would imply to have the ability.
Why bother?
This, and I'd raise the bar even further: if we were to be attacked by any alien civilization, no matter if they have FTL or other Clarke tech or even if they have no special tech at all, we're incredibly f**ed.
It would be trivial to hurl asteroids at us until we're all dead. It would be trivial to engineer deadly pathogens, or to flood our planet with hunter-killer drones, or to roast the Earth with solar mirrors. And those are just the low tech options. We chose not to colonize the solar system, and thus we have no possible way of countering a civilization even if it was on the same developmental level as us.
Maybe we'd be able to mount a counter strike against one alien craft if they're unlucky and don't eradicate us outright. But that's a very big if.
However, I sleep well at night knowing that we have so far not seen anyone else out there, and we definitely have not seen a large space ship entering our system. Assuming they're bound to known physics, we'd definitely pick up their deceleration burn as they approach. If someone wants to eradicate us, a risk-free strategy would probably be to bombard us from outside the solar system.
So in that case, it was called the "7-hour war" for a reason.
If anyone imagines fighting alien invaders with small arms they’re already stupidly out of touch.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/190678
Same thing for aliens, imagine an alien refugee ship capable of FTL but needs a special fuel that it has to collect from deep Earth ocean very slowly, perhaps for a few million years because Earth only has very very few of such fuel. There is not much the refugees can do. They don't have weapons, they still habe to gather food and energy, they can't do a lot of bad things to locals (us)
Pirates with FTL ships pop in, destroy your outer gas mining stations. You scramble your planetside navy, which begins to burn toward your system's equivalent of Jupiter. They'll be there in 4 months. In a matter of seconds, the pirates zip out beyond the Oort Cloud. Your navy are currently half-way between Earth and Jupiter, and, at that moment, the pirates pop-in next to your Earthside starport and have their way with your home base. You call your navy back, even as you know it'll make no difference.
(On the flip side, later, once you unlock warp and can zip across your star system in seconds, you feel like a god. Repeat with interstellar travel.)
0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/261470/Distant_Worlds_Uni...
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 world.
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.
That's not a "necessary function of any civilization," that's dereliction of duty to the people who elected the leaders.
Ride super high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a superhero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scrambling the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
Only got the season wrong …
Fitting prelude and postlude to Alphaville - Forever Young...
This makes the Goldfinger cover (which is awesome) make all the more sense. At one point he starts singing in German and I always just assumed it was for style. In reality - he's singing the "real" song, and one of the most critical parts "censored" for the English version. This is what he's singing in German:
----
"Ninety-nine ministers of war
Matches and petrol cans (gasoline cans)
They regarded themselves as clever people
Already on the scent of fat quarry
They shouted "War" and wanted power
Man, who would have thought
That someday it would come as far as this
Because of ninety-nine balloons"
----
It's a shame he stops there since the German ending is also dramatically better, "Ninety-nine years of war. Left no place for victors. There are no longer any ministers of war. And also no jet fighters. Today I'm making my rounds. I see the world lying in ruins. I have found a balloon. I think of you and let it fly."
The English version ending speaks in metaphor and can even be interpreted to mean it might have just been a dream.
----
Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiwgOWo7mDc
Goldfinger Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQFplXS0DIM
English Lyrics ("censored") - https://genius.com/Nena-99-red-balloons-lyrics
English Lyrics (translated from German) - https://lyricstranslate.com/en/99-Luftballons-99-Luftballons...
Btw, original "official" music video:
https://youtu.be/Fpu5a0Bl8eY
I guess they meant red in the sense of "communist" though...
That is why spy satellites at much lower altitudes can be useful to spy on other countries. However anything below 100 km is considered an intrusion into the sovereign airspace of a country.
The USAF has purchased more than 10,000 of the AIM-9X model alone (not counting the other operators, domestic and foreign, and not counting all the other variants of the Sidewinder, the basic model of which has been in service since the 1950s).
That's a helluva lot more than "one per career".
https://www.navair.navy.mil/news/Air-Air-Missiles-Takes-Deli... 1
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 very welcome
Isn't heat detected by infrared? What's the difference?
Countermeasures like flares try to trick a missile's sensor into thinking the hot object it was staring at was the flare going that way and not the maneuvering aircraft going the other way. Modern IR tracking missiles try to stay locked on the object by ignoring hotter or cooler objects that might end up in its view.
The AIM-9L doesn't lock on to the hottest thing, it takes an IR picture of the scene and follows the targeted "blob" in the image that's generated. Additionally it has laser proximity fusing so it knows when it is close to the shape it is tracking. By not simply picking the hottest thing in a scene you can't hide in front of the sun anymore, and the effectiveness of flares is reduced.
The only thing needed to generate a "blob" good enough to target is sufficient ΔT between the scene and the targeted object.
The objects, and they have been curiously consistent with calling them "objects", definitely have sufficient ΔT compared to the background sky if they are made of any solid material that has been exposed to sunlight for any period of time.
That's the extent of my knowledge about the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Because we're starting to get those answers.
There has been (and that was just last week), an open Senate committee hearing[0] with DoD officials about the balloon, a classified briefing about same and a press briefing[1] by Senators after the classified hearing.
I watched the Senate hearing and got lots of good information, with even more info gleaned from stuff alluded to and teased to the Senators for the classified hearing.
With much more to come once the House comes back into session I'm sure.
[0] https://www.c-span.org/video/?525930-1/defense-department-of...
[1] https://www.c-span.org/video/?525949-1/senators-speak-closed...
Perhaps there’s some system where downvotes encourage a post to be taken off the front page quicker. But I suspect moderator involvement. Which is misguided if so: people will simply post dupes and continue to upvote them. Thus, the story is still on the front-page, but in a fragmented manner.
Even just an image of the objects would help, but at the moment we have nothing and there is not much opportunity to provide insightful comments.
Letting the first one fly across the country and generate so much coverage just prior to these latest events seems more than a coincidence as well.
Normally we'd merge the comments into the earlier post, but since this article has more information, I'll merge them hither instead.
Probably the best stealth there is: to be classed as noise.
In fact, the NOAA launches dozens of weather balloons daily.
Seems like recent attention is causing a bit of an over correction.
I guess people are focusing on it because anyone that counters them ends up looking like they are trying to minimize a rather calamitous event.
Like burning off the vinyl chloride monomer is going to produce quite a lot of gnarly stuff like hydrogen chloride (which turns into hydrochloric acid when in solution with water), but there hasn't been any information produced that indicates that there will actually be a persistent problem stemming from it (at least, relative to the emissions environment that exists).
Just ask an Ohioan where the come from and they're likely to say "Pennsyltucky" (Pennsylvania and Kentucky being eastern and western border states to Ohio), to obfuscate the existence of their severe danger zone![0]
[0] cf. Poe's Law, as this note serves as a "clear indicator" of my parody.
The resources (including “human resources”) we use to check the sky are not the same resources used to track undersea threats. If anything, an elevated general state of alert from probing in the one domain makes it more, not less, likely than any intrusion in the other would be detected.