Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MrRoboto75]

At least it's nice to know that if ever a highly advanced alien race decides to take a look at earth with balloon probes, that they will be welcomed with a boom. I am sure that will make us very pop-ular with them.

Bloons Tower Defense is in fact very accurate.

[Flying Teasets]

Bloomberg reports 3 balloons likely private project, not Chinese.

[Starver]

Bloomberg reports balloons likely private project, not Chinese.

The three 'lesser' ones, at least (and quite likely the one that Romania sent jets up to look for, but then couldn't find, and any others that much further away). Seemingly of different designs to, and smaller than, the "it was just a weather balloon!" from China.

It is so easy to launch a balloon, though perhaps less so as the payload goes from "the size of a small car" towards "the size of a small bus" (even if not the mass of either). But most research balloons are not going to be sophisticated enough to circumnavigate the planet, or a significant proportion. They probably will just rise and rise, and expand and expand, until they pop themselves. Nor have there been any public noises from anyone else that thinks their balloon was the one that got dunked in Lake Huron/whatever. And the wreckage (or the whole thing, the Huron one apparently descended gracefully - perhaps they finally managed just to make the balloon leak?) of the still-mysterious ones hasn't been yet discovered and recovered (nor may it be, any time soon).

[King Zultan]

They're gonna be searching for these balloons for the next few years now.

[jipehog]

it seems that balloons with with decent payload expected to pop and have parachutes, so if you can shoot them down carefully their payload should descend nicely and safely to be collected.

[Starver]

But heat-seaking missiles are going to negate that prepared eventuality.

What you really wanted was an optical guidance system that honed in on the round envelope before non-explosively impacting it. Or maybe even loosing microfletchettes at it, ahead of the main missile, that might create a slow leak.

With the initial reports that the first missile had missed one of the balloons, and the second then caused it to start to descend slowly, I'm inclined to wonder if they'd tried a modified seek-mode whereby the IR/radar lock (primarily on the package being suspended, having more active heat/radar cross-section than the rest of it) was made to switch to "jink up, just a little" shortly before impact, towards this very end.

(This is how I personally think it should be done, given the basic facts I think I know. But IANAMissileDesigner/Operator, so I might be way off.)

[Magmacube_tr]

So

World War Balloon when?

[martinuzz]

Humans are too primitive a species to be trusted with anything pointier than a balloon

[Eric Blank]

Bullshit

We'd just force them over our enemies' heads to suffocate them.

Still too dangerous.

[KittyTac]

Perhaps they're unmanned because it's alien machine AIs coming to enforce laws against the abuse of pupal AIs.

I knew me trolling ChatGPT would come back to bite me in the ass!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[King Zultan]

Since when did those chatbots become that coherent?

[KittyTac]

Since when did those chatbots become that coherent?

It's the most advanced one so far.

[Starver]

But it clearly has a limited set of building-block phrases. I mean, that's like a typical politician roadblocking in an interview with a specific talking point they really want to ensure comes out in the eventual soundbite, while not having any confidence that they can extemporise at least an unrehearsed (and un-vetted) variation, never mind going completely off script.

(Of course, it's not so bad as "You ask me about that, but what I think the people really want to know is...".)

[jipehog]

But it clearly has a limited set of building-block phrases.

I don't know about that. Such AI's are trained on huge DB of conversation in social media, but often uses a more formal debate structure in its response e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3u-1yttrVw

Next step we replace low effort trolling with chatbots to flood social media to trigger and derail conversations, sadly the finally frontier will be balloon jokes

[KittyTac]

But it clearly has a limited set of building-block phrases. I mean, that's like a typical politician roadblocking in an interview with a specific talking point they really want to ensure comes out in the eventual soundbite, while not having any confidence that they can extemporise at least an unrehearsed (and un-vetted) variation, never mind going completely off script.

(Of course, it's not so bad as "You ask me about that, but what I think the people really want to know is...".)

No it's just trained to speak formally.