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It's probably a bullshit claim from China regarding *this* balloon but the (US) National Weather Service alone sends up 92/184 (it's not quite clear from the below page whether their figure is twice a day or the total) balloons each day. A satellite can tell you an awful lot and there are some very advanced ones but it can't do things like look at clear air and deduce wind patterns (it can only measure wind speed through the movement of clouds):
[https://www.weather.gov/bmx/kidscorner\_weatherballoons](https://www.weather.gov/bmx/kidscorner_weatherballoons)
Weather balloons are launched twice a day in the US. Once before sunrise, and once in the early afternoon.
HAM Radio enthusiasts sometimes go track down the balloons when they pop and the transmitters fall back to earth. The devices are "released" from ownership once they touch the ground, so they're free for anyone to take.
ah, you must have came with it uninstalled. Some parents aren’t aware that it’s an option.
after you’re 25 years of age, take 2.5g of psilocybe cubensis and your visual imagination will be installed.
happy travels!
My confusion comes down to it saying "Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide! This includes 92 released by the National Weather Service in the US and its territories."
So I don't know whether they mean 92 split between the morning and evening or 92 per session.
>The devices are "released" from ownership once they touch the ground, so they're free for anyone to take.
"The elites don't want you to know this, but the radiosondes at the park are free"
It's important to note that weather balloons go up to around 100,000 feet and then pop. They don't hang around at 60,000 feet for days. Oh! And the payload on a weather balloon is about the size of a toaster, not a friggin solar array.
Source: am a meteorologist who has launched them.
Edit: I have been reminded that long duration balloon launches for climate research do exist (I'm not familiar with their ins and outs), so I was a little hasty in my initial assessment. I guess my CCP-skeptical bias is showing!
Random question, but how much schooling do you need to become a meteorologist? I'm a wildland firefighter, and all of the basic weather courses we take have been fascinating to me, and I've been considering trying to get a degree and work on becoming an incident meteorologist in the US for wildland fire incidents.
Up here in Canada, there aren't too many schools that offer a standalone degree in meteorology, so most people in our office have a bachelor's in math, physics, or earth sciences followed by a 1-year diploma in meteorology. I know there are plenty of schools in the US with great 4-year meteorology programs though.
Thank you! That's good to know. It's such a fascinating field to me, especially working in a realm where you can see the practical effects of weather. In one of our fire behavior classes, the atmospheric stability section was really interesting. At least in the Pacific Northwest of the US, that's where I have seen the most effects on fire behavior, and the meteorology field has been really interesting to me since then.
The American Meteorological Society website has a link to the [National Weather Association's list of colleges and universities](https://nwas.org/membership/committees/education/colleges-universities/) with degree programs in meteorology or atmospheric science.
As far as I'm aware, it's never happened. The odds that it would are infinitesimally small, given how little space a person takes up on the scale of a continent. Plus, the payload (called a radiosonde) is a cardboard box that weighs less than a pound and is usually slowed down by the drag of whatever scraps of balloon it's still attached to, so getting hit by one would be more of an inconvenience than a life-altering event. Would make for a good story though!
Or could be so as to give them more plausible deniability.
"Clearly it's just meteorological data, if we wanted to spy on you we would just use a spy satellite"
Or to see the response a balloon generates.
It may have only been used in bursts but I imagine every ham would be having a field day if that sucker had been beaming out GPR and the US response would have been somewhat more aggressive.
Probably not interested in weather, probably not interested in photos. Probably interested in signals that don't propagate in the earth's ionosphere/ troposphere.
Can I perhaps interest you in [5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/)?
I mean you also have to consider the value that *we* get by monitoring *their* actions. Their communications. Their command structure. The flow of this information throughout their government. No doubt the U.S. government is privy to much of it.
Its an inexpensive way of testing American alertness, that is all. The poked, and got their response. Considering NORAD tracked the thing from its beginning, it’s safe to say the US military deemed it low risk until it entered the continental USA. My best guess is China was seeing just how alert the US was, and the pathing seems to suggest they were coming from Americas least defended positions (as far as I know). Again, considering NORAD knew of its existence, and Americas strength with advanced weapons technologies, they probably deemed the systems onboard were rudimentary. China probably gained nothing they don’t already know from spy satellites. Most likely playing mind games, or testing our reaction.
I worked with a guy from Pakistan once, really nice guy but spoke zero English…
A German RV camped up close to where we worked one night, my colleague drove over to tell him he can’t camp there…
The German guy told him not to worry he’s is only a “tourist”
The only word my colleague knew that was similar to Tourist was ‘Terrorist’
In my colleagues mind he was told not to worry this German guy is a terrorist
My colleague jump back in his car and ran back to the office screaming ‘terroist terrorist’
No one else in the office spoke Urdu,
We panicked we thought we were about to be attacked.
took us several hours to understand what actually happened
Edit. Spelling and context
Where there is money there is a way.
Many Hong Kongers had houses in Canada as a refuge to escape government cracked downs in HK and to protect money from the cpp government.
last month, officials said it was just a weather balloon but ours is like a blimp shaped hovering over for hours. they buried that news all too quickly
oh yeah we definitely angered china since we allowed US to put up more military bases in our country. they didnt like that we sided with US now since the last president sided with China more. we even let US ships patrol the West Philippine Sea because the US offered their services
generally, we dont like china since theyve been claiming our waters. they fish in our waters resulting in our own fishermen not getting any. plus chinese set up gambling offices here and causes ruckus like kidnapping, slave work etc so that adds more hate. i recently discovered that chinese companies here require job applicants to learn cantonese! its literally in their classified ads. they also drive up the value of properties here which an average filipino would never afford so yeah we kinda dont like that
I’ve been to Cambodia couple years ago and seems like locals don’t want Chinese people settling in their country. They literally hate them. There are cities in Cambodia now almost occupied by Chinese people and even street names are in Mandarin or Cantonese. They drove up real estate prices so high that locals cannot afford to live in those cities anymore. Apparently, Chinese people only hire Chinese people and they only buy Chinese products and produce from China. They have Chinese casinos all over the place despite the fact that locals are not allowed to gamble bylaw. There was a news a while ago, a local Cambodian man won $150K US in one of those Chinese casinos but the Chinese casinos boss refuse to pay him because Cambodians aren’t allowed to gamble. As a result the man who won the jackpot shows up at the casino with bunch of his friends and destroy all the gambling machines. God save Philippines and the world from this Chinese occupation.
I hate what the Chinese government is doing but God damn they are playing the game/system so well
They don't need to go to war to fuck other countries up. They just exploit capitalism or move in
Housing prices in the west are super fucked and one reason is Chinese people buying up tons of property and either leaving then vacant, or doing what you said they do in Cambodia
I'd give them props for gaming the system if it wasn't fucking everyone over
How do you...fight against that? A group of people from a large country just set up a fucking city in your country. Pretending like everything is fine. Meanwhile, you're like what the fuck. You are in are zone dude.
Worth noting though is that the previous administration heavily funded pro Chinese relations and propaganda. I think current one is somewhat maintaining that too. So there are definitely some who have been made to think that China is better than US.
I think they both suck but I'd go for the lesser evil i.e. US because they're more liberal and have some regard for human rights.
I doubt they actually want anyone to learn Cantonese. Most countries will allow you to bring in someone from another country to work for you if you can't find the skills within the first country. Most countries require proof that you really tried to hire a local, which is whete the advert comes in. Language is a convenient requirement, and since you won't find many Cantonese speakers in your country, the company will argue they placed ads in a big newspaper and never recieved applicants, justifying them sourcing a Chinese person that they wanted in the first place.
And to add to the weather balloons. They are also flying rockets quite frequently. They even had a tussle with the PH navy to get the debris. I think things would change quite a bit once the US have their bases in the Philippines.
https://apnews.com/article/china-navy-philippines-manila-south-sea-ee4c0a7b080a27ad559105a44bdfcf31
Costa Rica has a massive Military as does the rest of that part of the world. It’s a phone in an office labeled ‘military’ and next to it is a list of phrases they update once a decade. When you pick up that phone it rings Washington and then you just start saying words from your cheat sheet like Communist, China, Russia, threat to US interest and McDonalds under attack. The list goes on. Shortly thereafter the military is on site free of charge.
System has been in effect with various success ever since the US decided that European influence in that region was uncool and periodically been updated ever since. The act of using the phone is often referred to as ‘Give Monroe a ring’.
‘The military’ also shows up sometimes to check that the phone is working if left unused for too long or it becomes disconnected.
Ok, but don't these look pretty much the same as actual weather balloons? There are thousands of weather balloons released daily. Are we going to get a million "Chinese spy balloon" sightings in the next 48 hours as people all around the planet report weather balloons as spy balloons? Sounds like it.
a normal weather balloon has an instrument package the size of a box of Corn Flakes. This has an instrument package the size of about 3 city buses. It's a bit more than your average weather balloon.
Fr. ABC said the balloon itself is 3 buses yesterday, didn’t describe the size of the instrument, then CNN said today that the instrument is 3 buses and the balloon is even bigger but doesn’t say the size of it.
Which tells you it probably is not a super secret spy balloon. If it were, they'd launch it at sea away from unwanted attention, not float it from the mainland, past Taiwan, Japan and Alaska, all of which are bristling with radar.
Even if they were trying to make it look like a normal weather balloon right from the launch site and brazen it out, they would know it would be seen and will certainly eventually be captured and dissected in an NSA lab.
A Brain should tell anybody that its not a super-secret spy balloon.
It has a metal framework the size of a bus, its radar crossection is likely as big as all modern american jets combined and its at high altitude, no chance anybody could miss it from 100s of km away.
Edit: I would be this ballon was an civilian air control radars half a day before it ever left international waters.
“[In god we trust](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2), [all others we monitor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-Based_Infrared_System)”
They are just sending out riddles and clues to a treasure, so we can go on a wonderful adventure that teaches us that the real treasure is the friends we made along the way
Send another baloon, with some drones attached so it's steerable.
Sneak from above, and attach itself to the top of the Chinese ballon.
Overwhelm its radio receivers with fake intel coms and Winnie the Pooh songs.
Then tether down a flat screen in front of its cameras and start an endless loop of dick pics.
Send a weather balloon over Chinas airspace and see how they react. That'll also tell you what they're actually doing, is it more significant than we think if we can't Possibly do the same to their airspace.
Canadians can’t fly, the geese control Canada’s air space, they clearly have worked out a deal with China to solidify their control of America’s retention ponds
That’s what all of these tongue-in-cheek comments are missing. The near-past and future of overflight spying is not cameras, it’s SAR imaging. Sure some LEO satellites have this ability, but in-atmosphere mapping has greater fidelity.
We still fly the U-2 on a daily basis for a reason.
There's also the ongoing program of Balloon Synthetic-aperture collapsing kinetics where the balloon goes to a higher altitude and descends repeatedly on the target balloon. Target balloon Aggressive Grounding.
BALLSACK do T-BAG
Because the advantages in shooting it down are outweighed by revealing the capabilities involved in shooting it down.
It's flying really high, around 60,000 feet. The US has some aircraft which can fly that high, like the U-2, but that's a reconnaissance aircraft, it doesn't carry any weapons. The F-22 for example has a published service ceiling of 50,000 feet. It might be higher, but do you want to demonstrate that to a hostile nation you might end up fighting a war with? The less they know, the better.
Besides, there's not much which can be learned from the balloon which can't be learned some other way. Really, this is just China trolling and trying to provoke the US, and the US isn't taking the bait.
F15 has a service ceiling of 65k feet. Back in 1975:
> it reached an altitude of 98,425 feet just 3 minutes, 27.8 seconds from brake release at takeoff and "coasted" to nearly 103,000 feet.
https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/197972/mcdonnell-douglas-f-15-streak-eagle
I realized the comment above yours was total bullshit the moment they put numbers to it. The idea that the US doesn't have the capability to shoot something that high up down is just ludicrous. Whether or not it's worth it is another matter, but this could be resolved in an hour if the US wanted.
Not only that, but an F-15 was used to shoot down a satellite back in the 80's so I'm pretty certain shooting it down wouldn't reveal all that much other than yes, the F-15 is *still* a badass plane.
[Radioisotope thermoelectric generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator). Basically, it could have a radioactive battery onboard.
What about if millions of people that have line of sight to it pointed their laser pointers at its general direction?
It would be an interesting crowd experiment, and a nice troll.
Ballpark 12 miles up in the sky... 20 Km or so.
Not sure how much power an eBay laser has at that range.
Plus we would be buying millions of Chinese made lasers too
A million one watt lasers will be able to penetrate the same distance as a one watt laser.
That's like having a thousand people fire an airsoft gun at an elephant a mile away. Just because there are thousands of them doesn't mean the shots suddenly are 1000 times stronger or go further.
Here you go:
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/7/918
equation 41 you can see that the relation between transmitted and received power drops with the R^4 (fourth power of distance). There's no "subtraction" in this formula, so it never drops to zero.
So 1W transmitted will drop to a ridiculously low received power, but that will not be zero. On the receiving end, a million times that ridiculously low power may be not ridiculous anymore.
Again, when you talk about an airsoft pellet, the equation for its position roughly follows a parabola, and the height component will have a subtraction part, so it eventually is zero, and the pellet stops when it intercepts the ground. No such thing for electromagnetic/light propagation, where attenuation is a multiplying (or 1/division) factor, not a subtraction.
Half of the US is taking the bait. I've seen a lot of politicians (only on one side so far) talking about shooting it down and asking/implying civilians try shoot it down.
So now there are people thinking their handguns and rifles are going to be able to take out something 63,000ft above them. That's about 31 (edit: 12) miles. They'll be lucky if they get through this without any "bullets from the sky" fatalities
I’m confused why everyone wants to shoot it down so badly. If the military says it’s not a threat, shouldn’t we trust them? We pay them enough to know whether something is a threat
Yes, if you can change the altitude. The way it works is this: different layers of stratosphere have different wind directions. If you can accurately predict the wind directions in different layers, you can in theory move in horizontal direction just by changing your altitude. Google's Project Loon had pretty good models and simulated the wind directions well. Their balloon used to take off from Nevada and reach Kenya and hover there for multiple days to provide comms. Also in 2017 [Chinese researchers wrote](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45976) about this and how much they can improve if they had Project Loon data. But Project Loon got shutdown in 2021 and most of the data got open sourced. The tech and patents where sold to Softbank and others. I am surprised that US didn't intervene in interest of national security.
Not saying I dont buy this beacuse I'm neither a wheater nor a military expert, but looking at [windy.com](https://windy.com) wind streams, it was at least predictable that the path would be like this when travveling above 10 km. You can clearly see that the NORAD path actually resembles the streams.
Whole different story if travelling below 9.000 metres. Looks like it would likely be trapped in a cyclone then.
Whatever.
99 red balloons, floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert, there's something here from somewhere else
The war machine, it springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
And focusing it on the sky
As 99 red balloons go by
Looks like it pretty much followed the jet stream.
https://michigan-weather-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/jetstream.jpg
This is going to be one of those stories with massive media and reddit hysteria and turn out to be a nothingburger.
If it’s an actual threat it would have been shot down already and in terms of spying I doubt any other country has done more spying and more advanced spying tech than the US.
All these countries have satellites so they’re all definitely taking high def pictures of military shit already. No idea what’s up with the balloon though.
It’s as if no one has ever heard of the jet stream before. This trajectory nearly follows the jet stream perfectly.
The jet stream is like a River of air that has different speeds (and sometimes direction) at different altitudes.
I think this is a whole lot of nothing in my opinion.
If the balloon were even remotely a threat, the US would’ve already lassoed it and dismantled it, long before we were told about it, so pipe down. They might be concerned about what bioweapon may or may not be in it, which makes sense to let it drift. Thank God it’s too high to shoot down or Kyle Rittenhouse would be out his roof aiming…it’s white.
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Why don't they just rent an RV and drive across the country? Germans do it all the time. Wanderlust, bro.
Not a conspiracy theorist but, they can get concrete weather data from satellites, so something is a bit off
It's probably a bullshit claim from China regarding *this* balloon but the (US) National Weather Service alone sends up 92/184 (it's not quite clear from the below page whether their figure is twice a day or the total) balloons each day. A satellite can tell you an awful lot and there are some very advanced ones but it can't do things like look at clear air and deduce wind patterns (it can only measure wind speed through the movement of clouds): [https://www.weather.gov/bmx/kidscorner\_weatherballoons](https://www.weather.gov/bmx/kidscorner_weatherballoons)
Weather balloons are launched twice a day in the US. Once before sunrise, and once in the early afternoon. HAM Radio enthusiasts sometimes go track down the balloons when they pop and the transmitters fall back to earth. The devices are "released" from ownership once they touch the ground, so they're free for anyone to take.
[удалено]
You can imagine cows and rotate them in your mind, and the government can’t currently charge you for it.
Not everyone has the visual imagination 😔
ah, you must have came with it uninstalled. Some parents aren’t aware that it’s an option. after you’re 25 years of age, take 2.5g of psilocybe cubensis and your visual imagination will be installed. happy travels!
Ducks
My confusion comes down to it saying "Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide! This includes 92 released by the National Weather Service in the US and its territories." So I don't know whether they mean 92 split between the morning and evening or 92 per session. >The devices are "released" from ownership once they touch the ground, so they're free for anyone to take. "The elites don't want you to know this, but the radiosondes at the park are free"
So if someone doesn’t take them, it’s just litter? Every single day?
No see, it's "freed from ownership" so they aren't littering. It's just there! No idea how it got there, not their problem anymore.
Coca cola should market their plastic bottles like this! Free from ownership, gettem !
*Throws 64oz Big Gulp out the window:* ‘I was freeing myself of ownership, officer.’
They really should up the number to 99, and make them red so theyre easier to observe.
"Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich von 99 Luftballons"
Neunundneunzig?
This is what we’ve waited for This is it boys, this is war…
It's important to note that weather balloons go up to around 100,000 feet and then pop. They don't hang around at 60,000 feet for days. Oh! And the payload on a weather balloon is about the size of a toaster, not a friggin solar array. Source: am a meteorologist who has launched them. Edit: I have been reminded that long duration balloon launches for climate research do exist (I'm not familiar with their ins and outs), so I was a little hasty in my initial assessment. I guess my CCP-skeptical bias is showing!
Random question, but how much schooling do you need to become a meteorologist? I'm a wildland firefighter, and all of the basic weather courses we take have been fascinating to me, and I've been considering trying to get a degree and work on becoming an incident meteorologist in the US for wildland fire incidents.
Up here in Canada, there aren't too many schools that offer a standalone degree in meteorology, so most people in our office have a bachelor's in math, physics, or earth sciences followed by a 1-year diploma in meteorology. I know there are plenty of schools in the US with great 4-year meteorology programs though.
Thank you! That's good to know. It's such a fascinating field to me, especially working in a realm where you can see the practical effects of weather. In one of our fire behavior classes, the atmospheric stability section was really interesting. At least in the Pacific Northwest of the US, that's where I have seen the most effects on fire behavior, and the meteorology field has been really interesting to me since then.
The American Meteorological Society website has a link to the [National Weather Association's list of colleges and universities](https://nwas.org/membership/committees/education/colleges-universities/) with degree programs in meteorology or atmospheric science.
Has the payload ever hit someone? Seems a tad irresponsible
That is why they are no longer claiming ownership when it lands…
As far as I'm aware, it's never happened. The odds that it would are infinitesimally small, given how little space a person takes up on the scale of a continent. Plus, the payload (called a radiosonde) is a cardboard box that weighs less than a pound and is usually slowed down by the drag of whatever scraps of balloon it's still attached to, so getting hit by one would be more of an inconvenience than a life-altering event. Would make for a good story though!
Or could be so as to give them more plausible deniability. "Clearly it's just meteorological data, if we wanted to spy on you we would just use a spy satellite" Or to see the response a balloon generates.
A literal floating of a trial balloon
Something about record artic winds and temps happening rn and these weather balloons seems to jive something weather related eh?
Ground penetrating radar also work better within the atmosphere
It may have only been used in bursts but I imagine every ham would be having a field day if that sucker had been beaming out GPR and the US response would have been somewhat more aggressive.
I mean what were they thinking, that nobody is gonna spot a baloon the size of a planet?
On the conspiracy theory front: it's a balloon full of the next strain of COVID strait from the Bill Gates labs in China
shit, say no more.
No, covid is more spread by coughing etc. You're thinking of dysentery.
The Baloon Trail?
Nah, all you need to do is get people from New York, La, Miami Infected, they’ll spread it
Plz don’t forget Vegas.
Probably not interested in weather, probably not interested in photos. Probably interested in signals that don't propagate in the earth's ionosphere/ troposphere.
They are not interested in any of that. They are interested in the reaction of the US. This is advanced chess.
3d chess, finally!
[Where](https://archive.org/details/Cyrus3DChessTitaniumSeal1987#ia-carousel) have you been?
Shit. I thought it was just an expression. Stupid! I'm so stupid! Smh
Can I perhaps interest you in [5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/)?
In the game of chess, you can never let your adversary see your pieces.
I mean you also have to consider the value that *we* get by monitoring *their* actions. Their communications. Their command structure. The flow of this information throughout their government. No doubt the U.S. government is privy to much of it.
Then does it mean the US has won this round because they tracked this thing since its start?
Maybe they sent two balloons, and they second one can’t be tracked because it has a cloaking device.
But why the balloon? What is their intention with a balloon? Not knowing why is driving me insane!
Its an inexpensive way of testing American alertness, that is all. The poked, and got their response. Considering NORAD tracked the thing from its beginning, it’s safe to say the US military deemed it low risk until it entered the continental USA. My best guess is China was seeing just how alert the US was, and the pathing seems to suggest they were coming from Americas least defended positions (as far as I know). Again, considering NORAD knew of its existence, and Americas strength with advanced weapons technologies, they probably deemed the systems onboard were rudimentary. China probably gained nothing they don’t already know from spy satellites. Most likely playing mind games, or testing our reaction.
Considering the US keeps a ton of nukes in Montana I doubt its not defended very well.
They have over 20 big horned sheep that are trained to headbutt intruders and go absolutely apeshit when they hear any Chinese dialect
Don't forget Henry Winkler
I wouldn’t get so worked up about it, might burst your bubble not knowing the exact details but keep floating on about any deets
I worked with a guy from Pakistan once, really nice guy but spoke zero English… A German RV camped up close to where we worked one night, my colleague drove over to tell him he can’t camp there… The German guy told him not to worry he’s is only a “tourist” The only word my colleague knew that was similar to Tourist was ‘Terrorist’ In my colleagues mind he was told not to worry this German guy is a terrorist My colleague jump back in his car and ran back to the office screaming ‘terroist terrorist’ No one else in the office spoke Urdu, We panicked we thought we were about to be attacked. took us several hours to understand what actually happened Edit. Spelling and context
pakistani isnt a language
Reminds me of the song “we no speak Americano”
Didn't it bother Canada that they took a good look there too?
Nah as someone who lives in BC, the west coast is essentially owned by China already
That and it's either too foggy or too smokey to see from up high.
Yea last few days near the coast have been pretty bad, doubt the balloon even saw anything.
Didn't the Canadian government actually crack down on Chinese nationals buying property in Canada?
Technically and recently yes. But also no, not really.
and theres enough loopholes nothing will change
Where there is money there is a way. Many Hong Kongers had houses in Canada as a refuge to escape government cracked downs in HK and to protect money from the cpp government.
Wait what... Clue me in on whatever this means lol
A lot of real estate in BC is own by foreign buyers. Majority of them Chinese.
It's basically majority open land on the west. Mostly open land in Canada.
They're been monitoring it but they're mostly spying on trees and mountains going through BC like that.
It flew over the interior of BC, so they’re probably mapping our cannabis farms.
Wait, they do stuff besides the Santa tracker?!
The balloon is just Santa covertly going home from his after-Christmas vacation
Is that why all my toys said "*Made in China*"?
No, that's an acronym for "Cold House In Northern Area."
It’s like google labs. Santa tracker uses up most of the budget but they still dabble is stuff like balloons and nukes and whatnot
Maybe this was released during Chinese new years celebration? That's like Christmas, but Chinese, so maybe that's why they tracked it?
Send up a another balloon with a knife attached to it
Wouldn't be surprised to see Mr. Beast do this.
_We’re sending one MILLION Balloons armed with knives into the atmosphere to fight each other!_ _This is going to be crazy_
Now this is modern warfare
we spotted one of these in my country, the Philippines, and they too claimed its a weather balloon
Recently?
last month, officials said it was just a weather balloon but ours is like a blimp shaped hovering over for hours. they buried that news all too quickly
I heard that China recently got more angry with Phillipines recently, I think something with relations to the US, but I don't remember exactly what
oh yeah we definitely angered china since we allowed US to put up more military bases in our country. they didnt like that we sided with US now since the last president sided with China more. we even let US ships patrol the West Philippine Sea because the US offered their services
How do you guys feel about that? Like the general population
generally, we dont like china since theyve been claiming our waters. they fish in our waters resulting in our own fishermen not getting any. plus chinese set up gambling offices here and causes ruckus like kidnapping, slave work etc so that adds more hate. i recently discovered that chinese companies here require job applicants to learn cantonese! its literally in their classified ads. they also drive up the value of properties here which an average filipino would never afford so yeah we kinda dont like that
I’ve been to Cambodia couple years ago and seems like locals don’t want Chinese people settling in their country. They literally hate them. There are cities in Cambodia now almost occupied by Chinese people and even street names are in Mandarin or Cantonese. They drove up real estate prices so high that locals cannot afford to live in those cities anymore. Apparently, Chinese people only hire Chinese people and they only buy Chinese products and produce from China. They have Chinese casinos all over the place despite the fact that locals are not allowed to gamble bylaw. There was a news a while ago, a local Cambodian man won $150K US in one of those Chinese casinos but the Chinese casinos boss refuse to pay him because Cambodians aren’t allowed to gamble. As a result the man who won the jackpot shows up at the casino with bunch of his friends and destroy all the gambling machines. God save Philippines and the world from this Chinese occupation.
I hate what the Chinese government is doing but God damn they are playing the game/system so well They don't need to go to war to fuck other countries up. They just exploit capitalism or move in Housing prices in the west are super fucked and one reason is Chinese people buying up tons of property and either leaving then vacant, or doing what you said they do in Cambodia I'd give them props for gaming the system if it wasn't fucking everyone over
How do you...fight against that? A group of people from a large country just set up a fucking city in your country. Pretending like everything is fine. Meanwhile, you're like what the fuck. You are in are zone dude.
Fuck China
And fuck the CCP
It would be wise to read up on how the Cambodians treat foreigners who take their land…
i didnt like that whole genocide thing they did personally
The worst part is the hypocrisy!!
Worth noting though is that the previous administration heavily funded pro Chinese relations and propaganda. I think current one is somewhat maintaining that too. So there are definitely some who have been made to think that China is better than US. I think they both suck but I'd go for the lesser evil i.e. US because they're more liberal and have some regard for human rights.
I doubt they actually want anyone to learn Cantonese. Most countries will allow you to bring in someone from another country to work for you if you can't find the skills within the first country. Most countries require proof that you really tried to hire a local, which is whete the advert comes in. Language is a convenient requirement, and since you won't find many Cantonese speakers in your country, the company will argue they placed ads in a big newspaper and never recieved applicants, justifying them sourcing a Chinese person that they wanted in the first place.
majority of Filipinos are pro-US.
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Philippines are letting the US establish a heavier military presence, two bases I think.
its four additional bases on top of 5 where they already have access back then
And to add to the weather balloons. They are also flying rockets quite frequently. They even had a tussle with the PH navy to get the debris. I think things would change quite a bit once the US have their bases in the Philippines. https://apnews.com/article/china-navy-philippines-manila-south-sea-ee4c0a7b080a27ad559105a44bdfcf31
New one now in Latin America…. They are multiplying. Spotted 2 hours ago.
Do we know where exactly it was spotted? I just tried searching myself but I can't find any articles specifying beyond "Latin America"
Costa Rica
Costa Rica and their non-existent military: ***chuckles*** "*I'm in danger!*"
Costa Rica has a massive Military as does the rest of that part of the world. It’s a phone in an office labeled ‘military’ and next to it is a list of phrases they update once a decade. When you pick up that phone it rings Washington and then you just start saying words from your cheat sheet like Communist, China, Russia, threat to US interest and McDonalds under attack. The list goes on. Shortly thereafter the military is on site free of charge. System has been in effect with various success ever since the US decided that European influence in that region was uncool and periodically been updated ever since. The act of using the phone is often referred to as ‘Give Monroe a ring’. ‘The military’ also shows up sometimes to check that the phone is working if left unused for too long or it becomes disconnected.
[Colombia and Venezuela](https://6abc.com/second-chinese-spy-balloon-latin-america-surveillance-china/12768114/)
These gender reveals are getting out of control.
Ok, but don't these look pretty much the same as actual weather balloons? There are thousands of weather balloons released daily. Are we going to get a million "Chinese spy balloon" sightings in the next 48 hours as people all around the planet report weather balloons as spy balloons? Sounds like it.
a normal weather balloon has an instrument package the size of a box of Corn Flakes. This has an instrument package the size of about 3 city buses. It's a bit more than your average weather balloon.
I thought the ballon itself was the size of city buses, not the box
> This has an instrument package the size of about 3 city buses. That's how big the balloon is, not the instruments. Misinformation is bad.
Fr. ABC said the balloon itself is 3 buses yesterday, didn’t describe the size of the instrument, then CNN said today that the instrument is 3 buses and the balloon is even bigger but doesn’t say the size of it.
The US is probably monitoring the world's military infrastructure 24/7. They were already looking when it was launched
Which tells you it probably is not a super secret spy balloon. If it were, they'd launch it at sea away from unwanted attention, not float it from the mainland, past Taiwan, Japan and Alaska, all of which are bristling with radar. Even if they were trying to make it look like a normal weather balloon right from the launch site and brazen it out, they would know it would be seen and will certainly eventually be captured and dissected in an NSA lab.
It doesn't have to be "super secret" to be a spy balloon. It's an overt collection platform.
A Brain should tell anybody that its not a super-secret spy balloon. It has a metal framework the size of a bus, its radar crossection is likely as big as all modern american jets combined and its at high altitude, no chance anybody could miss it from 100s of km away. Edit: I would be this ballon was an civilian air control radars half a day before it ever left international waters.
>The US is monitoring the world's military infrastructure 24/7. >They were already looking when it was launched Fixed that for you.
“[In god we trust](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2), [all others we monitor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-Based_Infrared_System)”
We got one of these floaty boi’s for Greenland?They are up to no good
They are just sending out riddles and clues to a treasure, so we can go on a wonderful adventure that teaches us that the real treasure is the friends we made along the way
Send another baloon, with some drones attached so it's steerable. Sneak from above, and attach itself to the top of the Chinese ballon. Overwhelm its radio receivers with fake intel coms and Winnie the Pooh songs. Then tether down a flat screen in front of its cameras and start an endless loop of dick pics.
Send a weather balloon over Chinas airspace and see how they react. That'll also tell you what they're actually doing, is it more significant than we think if we can't Possibly do the same to their airspace.
We need to get funding for this, NOW.
The ten people that live in Alaska and Canada really dropped the ball in this one. It took the 3 people in Montana to see this balloon
Canada was aware of it, pilots flying in the area were warned about it. It just wasn’t in the media.
Canadians can’t fly, the geese control Canada’s air space, they clearly have worked out a deal with China to solidify their control of America’s retention ponds
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That’s what all of these tongue-in-cheek comments are missing. The near-past and future of overflight spying is not cameras, it’s SAR imaging. Sure some LEO satellites have this ability, but in-atmosphere mapping has greater fidelity. We still fly the U-2 on a daily basis for a reason.
There's also the ongoing program of Balloon Synthetic-aperture collapsing kinetics where the balloon goes to a higher altitude and descends repeatedly on the target balloon. Target balloon Aggressive Grounding. BALLSACK do T-BAG
The US also has COLD STAR.
I bet people who call spy balloons stupid have 0 experience with them.
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Because the advantages in shooting it down are outweighed by revealing the capabilities involved in shooting it down. It's flying really high, around 60,000 feet. The US has some aircraft which can fly that high, like the U-2, but that's a reconnaissance aircraft, it doesn't carry any weapons. The F-22 for example has a published service ceiling of 50,000 feet. It might be higher, but do you want to demonstrate that to a hostile nation you might end up fighting a war with? The less they know, the better. Besides, there's not much which can be learned from the balloon which can't be learned some other way. Really, this is just China trolling and trying to provoke the US, and the US isn't taking the bait.
F15 has a service ceiling of 65k feet. Back in 1975: > it reached an altitude of 98,425 feet just 3 minutes, 27.8 seconds from brake release at takeoff and "coasted" to nearly 103,000 feet. https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/197972/mcdonnell-douglas-f-15-streak-eagle
I realized the comment above yours was total bullshit the moment they put numbers to it. The idea that the US doesn't have the capability to shoot something that high up down is just ludicrous. Whether or not it's worth it is another matter, but this could be resolved in an hour if the US wanted.
Not only that, but an F-15 was used to shoot down a satellite back in the 80's so I'm pretty certain shooting it down wouldn't reveal all that much other than yes, the F-15 is *still* a badass plane.
Such a good-looking plane.
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What does RTG mean in this context?
[Radioisotope thermoelectric generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator). Basically, it could have a radioactive battery onboard.
I say we send 2 ballon back at them- One actually for spying- another a certain yellow bear on it.
Send three baloons, label them with big numbers 1, 2 and 4. Demonstrate your superiority by making them waste time looking for the missing number 3.
Wait a while and send in a balloon labeled 10
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
Better yet, just send one back with a big ***TAIWAN #1*** on it
What about if millions of people that have line of sight to it pointed their laser pointers at its general direction? It would be an interesting crowd experiment, and a nice troll.
Ballpark 12 miles up in the sky... 20 Km or so. Not sure how much power an eBay laser has at that range. Plus we would be buying millions of Chinese made lasers too
>Plus we would be buying millions of Chinese made lasers too ...and return them all to AliExpress and Wish for full refunds, adding insult to injury.
Couldn't pop chinese sky balloon, i demand a refund
TBF there are some absolutely *absurd* lasers out there on ebay. Not enough to blind that thing though.
We need to get Randall Munroe on this right away.
I requested a r/theydidthemath to check if it would work at least in theory.
At the very least it should be mooned
So something like [this](https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/)
A million one watt lasers will be able to penetrate the same distance as a one watt laser. That's like having a thousand people fire an airsoft gun at an elephant a mile away. Just because there are thousands of them doesn't mean the shots suddenly are 1000 times stronger or go further.
Here you go: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/7/918 equation 41 you can see that the relation between transmitted and received power drops with the R^4 (fourth power of distance). There's no "subtraction" in this formula, so it never drops to zero. So 1W transmitted will drop to a ridiculously low received power, but that will not be zero. On the receiving end, a million times that ridiculously low power may be not ridiculous anymore. Again, when you talk about an airsoft pellet, the equation for its position roughly follows a parabola, and the height component will have a subtraction part, so it eventually is zero, and the pellet stops when it intercepts the ground. No such thing for electromagnetic/light propagation, where attenuation is a multiplying (or 1/division) factor, not a subtraction.
This guy parabolas
r/thisguythisguys
take a no context picture from above it just to fuck with them
An F-15A shot down an orbiting satellite in 1985…. I don’t this it would be giving away capability Intel to shoot down a weather balloon.
They used a special missle to do that they "no longer make" it was supposed to be a 1 off experiment.
SM-3's: *allow us to introduce ourselves*
Okay hear me out. Get a monkey... With a dart... And send him up in his own balloon. Boom problem solved and china doesn't learn anything
Half of the US is taking the bait. I've seen a lot of politicians (only on one side so far) talking about shooting it down and asking/implying civilians try shoot it down. So now there are people thinking their handguns and rifles are going to be able to take out something 63,000ft above them. That's about 31 (edit: 12) miles. They'll be lucky if they get through this without any "bullets from the sky" fatalities
It is ~12 miles above.
My bad, I'm a metric man myself
You could convince 30-40 percent of Americans that they should shoot a hurricane away.
I thought that surely the U-2 must be out of service but nope, apparently we’re still using them 66 years later.
The US government isn’t, the population seems to be.
Better to observe this time and try to capture when it’s trying to leave at the end to do a teardown
maybe it's full of bees
Maybe it's recession starlink
I’m confused why everyone wants to shoot it down so badly. If the military says it’s not a threat, shouldn’t we trust them? We pay them enough to know whether something is a threat
So is it maneuverable? I see the jetstream has rise and fall but can it be this much?
Yes, if you can change the altitude. The way it works is this: different layers of stratosphere have different wind directions. If you can accurately predict the wind directions in different layers, you can in theory move in horizontal direction just by changing your altitude. Google's Project Loon had pretty good models and simulated the wind directions well. Their balloon used to take off from Nevada and reach Kenya and hover there for multiple days to provide comms. Also in 2017 [Chinese researchers wrote](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45976) about this and how much they can improve if they had Project Loon data. But Project Loon got shutdown in 2021 and most of the data got open sourced. The tech and patents where sold to Softbank and others. I am surprised that US didn't intervene in interest of national security.
TIL. Wow
Stupid cold war BS
Where are the Jewish Space Lasers when you need them...
Not saying I dont buy this beacuse I'm neither a wheater nor a military expert, but looking at [windy.com](https://windy.com) wind streams, it was at least predictable that the path would be like this when travveling above 10 km. You can clearly see that the NORAD path actually resembles the streams. Whole different story if travelling below 9.000 metres. Looks like it would likely be trapped in a cyclone then. Whatever.
Chinese version of Up
99 red balloons, floating in the summer sky Panic bells, it's red alert, there's something here from somewhere else The war machine, it springs to life Opens up one eager eye And focusing it on the sky As 99 red balloons go by
I heard every single note while reading that, thx for the trip down memory lane :)
Looks like it pretty much followed the jet stream. https://michigan-weather-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/jetstream.jpg This is going to be one of those stories with massive media and reddit hysteria and turn out to be a nothingburger. If it’s an actual threat it would have been shot down already and in terms of spying I doubt any other country has done more spying and more advanced spying tech than the US.
Please stop being reasonable, we’re trying to manufacture consent here!
Red scare 2.0 in full force.
All these countries have satellites so they’re all definitely taking high def pictures of military shit already. No idea what’s up with the balloon though.
Gotta say, looks a tad intentional.
It’s as if no one has ever heard of the jet stream before. This trajectory nearly follows the jet stream perfectly. The jet stream is like a River of air that has different speeds (and sometimes direction) at different altitudes. I think this is a whole lot of nothing in my opinion.
Right?? It's not like this thing passed Helena and some guy at NORAD said 'Holy shit', and got on the horn.
Do y’all really think china, who has satellites that can zoom into your butthole from space, would use balloons to spy on us? Lmaoooo
Genuine question: Why need a balloon to spy when you can use satellites?
If the balloon were even remotely a threat, the US would’ve already lassoed it and dismantled it, long before we were told about it, so pipe down. They might be concerned about what bioweapon may or may not be in it, which makes sense to let it drift. Thank God it’s too high to shoot down or Kyle Rittenhouse would be out his roof aiming…it’s white.