2dimes wrote:Could a person post actual thoughts in the astronomy thread, in response to a question about observing a green comet, instead of random things copied from other websites? Of course. Or was that your point? By the way did you observe the comet from your yard and were you using a telescope? It's been too cloudy here all week.
Obviously China could put bad things in the balloon but it's very unlikely. They are not seeking problems from North America. Also where the balloon goes is pretty random.
They would need to not only want to risk causing harm to where they hope a balloon will go, they also would need to accept the risk, of harming what ever region the balloon ends up. Maybe it would not go away and end up breaking up over China.
You're not going to get much if anything from a spy ballon you couldn't get from google earth, so to shoot it down could cause a diplomatic problem, while letting it float around Montana is seriously no big deal.
Can people post thoughts about balloons instead of links to websites? It’s annoying.
Also yeah… basically this balloon “technology” is pretty weak and provides China with nothing. Possibly they were testing our ability to detect these balloons. That’s it.
Apparently this was not the first and the military has let these go with no action. I presume our military was letting them proceed unmolested likely just to (possibly) let China think they were escaping detection. ( i.e. letting them think our defense is weaker than it actually is.). If true this idea was tossed out the window when this one ballon was so easy to detect that it as visible from the ground with the naked eye.
Regarding the Nazi’s comment… I’m sure that Biden wasn’t “overruled”. Rather his ‘gut’ instinct was to shoot it down, but people with actual knowledge talked him out of it… likely for several reasons that we can speculate but not KNOW. They’re saying it’s more dangerous to shoot it down because of falling debris… but that’s a bullshit reason.
There’s ZERO risk of causing a diplomatic incident shooting it down.
Again… the most likely and reasonable scenario is we just wanted to pretend we didn’t detect these so China would underestimate our capabilities.
This idea/strategy comes directly from their own book.
(The Art of War)