If the High Altitude Objects are Extraterrestrial

[JoeOtterbein]

They would be decoys.

Certainly they are intelligent enough not to get shot down themselves. Also, they are likely able to travel in time, so they would know ahead of time to send out a decoy.

NORAD is shooting down clay pigeons and just do not want to admit it!

[canetoad]

1. I think Vlad Putin

Is trolling both USA and China.

[Kennah]

3. Vlad couldn't troll Belarus

[Irish_Dem]

12. More likely Russia and China are up to no good against the US.

[RussBLib]

2. how many people might feel compelled to launch something?

...like something with an odd octagonal shape with strings hanging down off of it?

[Kennah]

4. Like this?

[CentralMass]

16. Fetchez La Vache

[Silent3]

5. That's an odd assumption

While yes, maybe it's merely our lack of knowledge that makes time travel impossible for us, but it's not that unlikely that time travel is simply impossible no matter how much you know.

[JoeOtterbein]

6. To travel the vast distance needed, the only way would be a...

...wormhole or another way to make it back and forth in time enough to survive. If they were simply biological or even biological/robot entities. A robot could do it.

[Silent3]

7. Faster-than-light travel, no matter what mechanism is imagined to allow it...

Last edited Mon Feb 13, 2023, 10:16 AM - Edit history (1)

...leads to time-travel shoot-your-own-grandfather types of paradoxes. So in that sense, yes, if aliens can travel faster than light, time travel might come along with that as a package deal.

Then again, it might be that FTL travel is simply impossible for anyone, no matter how advanced.

There is also a solution, which violates the spirit of Relativity, but not necessarily the actual physics, that can make FTL paradox-free, but that's very speculative.

[Irish_Dem]

13. We could be like cavemen, primitive man, compared to ETs.

We know nothing.

[Silent3]

17. While that's probably true...

...that doesn't mean that we humans might not have figured out some of the fundamental limits of physics. Just because we're far from knowing everything doesn't mean, somewhere beyond our ignorance, everything magically becomes possible.

[brooklynite]

21. Wrong...

Movement at close to light speed results in time slowing down in comparison to the rest of the universe; it does NOT result in time going BACKWARDS, so no time travel paradoxes.

[Silent3]

28. I said FASTER than light means backward in time...

...which it does, in some frames of reference.

[Kaleva]

26. The Universe is expanding faster then the speed of light

We will never see much of the Universe because space is expanding faster then the light emitted by far away objects is traveling.

[Silent3]

29. The fabric of space expanding faster than the speed of light...

...does not cause the same paradox problems as FTL travel or FTL communication.

[Kaleva]

30. But if you can achieve FTL travel....

can it be fast enough to overcome the greater distances that space expansion is causing?

The Universe is estimated to be about 13.8 billion years old but the Observable Universe is about 94 billion light years in diameter. Some believe that the entire Universe is several times that size. If space was expanding at the speed of light, the entire Universe should only be about 13.8 billion light years in diameter.

Just how much FTL would a space traveler have to go in order to surpass space expansion and still be able travel great distances in a short time?

This isn't much of an issue if the aliens are residents of our own galaxy.

[Silent3]

31. Since the question depends on a bit of sci-fi speculation...

...it's hard to say, but I'd think that yes, if FTL travel were possible, the "Observable Universe" would be a bigger place for you, and you'd be able to discover parts of the universe otherwise completely closed off to us.

[roamer65]

8. I think we are finding the MAGAt mind control devices.

[Beartracks]

9. Or a probe...

===========

[WarGamer]

10. Or someone is trying to bankrupt the US by getting them to shot down a dozen mylar Party balloons

daily...

[Irish_Dem]

11. How many sidewinders do you think the USAF owns?

Quite a few.

[WarGamer]

18. Well I wasn't quite being serious :)

[Irish_Dem]

19. I know you weren't serious.

I was (side)winding you up.

[WarGamer]

20. hahahahaha...

Might be cheaper just to take some of these out of mothballs.

[Irish_Dem]

22. Cute as the dickens little bi-plane.

What the heck is it shooting down?

A blimp? Or balloon?

When I was in college, I dated a guy whose father was a career USAF test pilot who was one of the first
to pilot a USAF blimp if you can believe it.

Short lived assignment.

[WarGamer]

24. Crazy bastards.

Observation balloon pilots were the first pilots to jump with parachutes.

Don't ask me why... fighter pilots didn't use chutes until the final months of the war.

Ernst Udet bailed out of a plane with a chute...

[Irish_Dem]

25. Yes it took them some time to develop parachutes.

Some of that early parachute research was at Wright-Patt AFB, then called Wright Field.

[JHB]

14. Or... They're up so high because the air's too thin to play the Slim Whitman defense

Except for missiles with purpose-built yodeling warheads.

[Liberal In Texas]

15. They're almost certainly not ETs

It's more likely that they're Russian.

[Irish_Dem]

23. Or Chinese/NK

[Kaleva]

27. It has yet to be proven that they aren't giant alien anal probes