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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What’s going on with all the objects getting shot down over the US this weekend?

Best theory I've seen is that normally radar filters out slow-moving objects to avoid false positives. After the large balloon last week, NORAD recalibrated and went looking for slow-moving objects and found several that were real.

I put the chance of alien responsibility at 0%. America and China UFO-ing around the globe to flex their muscles about 50%, Israel/Germany/Russia UFOing for surveillance at 49%. What other states would have the intelligence for an object like that? Lastly, Nazis in the Arctic coming back for WW4 I put at 1% just for fun.

I personally like the idea that the UFOs are piloted by inner earth übertech, I think that's more fun than aliens.

I find Nazis in the Arctic more likely than Germany doing anything of the sort. Are you serious about Germany? If so, why?

They used to have the aerospace chops. West Germany was making their own, vaguely superior F117 stealth fighter, only for the US to pressure them to cancel it. That's basically a UFO.

During 1987, the existence of the Lampyridae project and its design was revealed to the United States in the form of a group of United States Air Force (USAF) officers, who were shown the piloted model, which was kept in a closed-off section of MBB's manufacturing facility at Ottobrunn, Bavaria, Germany. That same year, the Lampyridae project was terminated for unspecified reasons; diplomatic pressure on the part of the US has been attributed.

Of course, the Germany of the 80's is not the same as the Germany of today.

Whichever state has unlocked UFO-like technology must be wealthy and intelligent. I just wouldn’t be surprised if Germany had a black budget projects.

I do hope you're right and our state is indeed that intelligent.

India, Japan, the Koreas, France, Britain, Italy, Australia, and maybe Iran could, although only the Koreas and Japan are in the right neighborhood.

Not just the US: China and Uruguay report very similar UFO's.

I don't have a contribution as to what they are, but I want to chime in with an objection I haven't seen answered from the aliens crowd- if they're from space, why are they showing up over the arctic and staying in relatively northern locales? AIUI the way de-orbiting works you generally want to do it over the equator, and ways around that are the kind of horrendous energy inefficiency that such small craft would require reactionless drives to overcome(which in turn is a far more fundamental violation of physical laws than "mere" interstellar travel would be). I don't see a way to square that circle into "told you so" memes featuring that guy from the history channel with a perpetual bad hair day unless you go full schizo.

If the objects showing up are aliens, they are certainly not using conventional fusion drives. We would notice the gigantic plumes of plasma from the other side of the solar system. Most reports seem to agree on anomalous propulsion, extremely sudden and violent acceleration. That could just be an optical illusion or error of course.

Alien technology is probably overwhelmingly beyond us, such that we don't understand the principles involved. Maybe once we have stellar-scale particle accelerators and planetary scale computers, a theory of everything, understand dark matter/energy and the origin of the universe, then we can be confident of these things.

Obviously a star decelerating into our solar system would’ve been immediately noticeable since at least the late 19th century, but solar sails or their magnetic equivalent could also be used to decelerate, and this is probably much less noticeable.

Going into (a low-inclination) orbit is somewhat easier near the equator, but deorbiting is just about equally easy (hard!) anywhere. The earth's spin only wants to accelerate you in one direction, but the Earth's atmosphere will happily decelerate you however.

(It's still not aliens.)

Ok, good to know.