This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I mean, actual negative mass might be physical. But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.
The first link seems very dubious in a lot of ways. You can't just strengthen the Earth's magnetic field - at least, not without an attractive force that cancels out the repulsion from the Meissner effect. I also don't see a way that this could be used to thrust a sphere in arbitrary directions; tacking is a thing (although not as much of a thing as in water), but a sphere has no keel to tack with. When I see "spherical craft" I think "balloon", and when I see "balloon moving very fast as seen by something moving very fast" I think "you misjudged its distance from you".
NB: I say that antimatter production wouldn't be impossible to hide because a purpose-built antimatter-making accelerator (which would be far more efficient than current accelerators) wouldn't actually need to be all that big, and because the van Allen belts have antimatter in them which could possibly be tapped without being world news.
This is the core claim, that the USG has sequestered an elite cadre of physicists and kept their discoveries under wraps. One observation in favor of this claim: the dearth of fundamental breakthroughs in physics for the past fifty years.
I think Eric Weinstein alluded to certain branches of physics possibly being forbidden by the government due to their potential weaponisation.
More options
Context Copy link
You don't just need to sequester the physicists; you need to sequester their equipment, too. Notice the sheer scale of facilities used for fundamental physics work these days; you're not hiding a 500-kilometre synchrotron. And a lot of the facilities that are built aren't even in the USA.
The necessary co-ordination to keep this straight quickly approaches Illuminati-complete.
That assumes that you need to smash particles together at higher and higher energies to test your hypotheses.
If you're on the hunt for gravitons and antigravitons, would that even be part of the research? Can gravitons even collide?
If you're starting fresh with an unexplored branch of physics you'll not have gotten to the point where testing hypotheses is so far along the curve of diminishing returns that the next advancement requires billions of dollars of capital. The first particle accelerator had a diameter of 4.5 inches. The first one that managed to split an atom was about 2 meters wide.
What of all the secretive Space Force X-37B missions? If you're looking for graviton signals it would be helpful to be in an environment where there are fewer of them.
More options
Context Copy link
Note- you need to sequester their equipment, and you need to get the skilled technicians turning wrenches to put it together to keep their mouths shut. Veteran and/or skilled trades circles would be abuzz with rumors of secret hidden technology- what we actually see is engineering school dropouts who find out their hair isn't weird enough for the ancient aliens grifting circuit.
More options
Context Copy link
Perhaps there is some physics research that doesn't require a 500 kilometre synchrotron.
Sure, but in a lot of cases this leads to "random scientists not part of the conspiracy could find it". Again, many of the facilities that are built aren't in the USA. And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.
Secret engineering projects are substantially easier to conceal than secret basic science, due to basic science being universal and thus independently discoverable.
Given the collective institutional support for transgenderism and the failure to call out the absurd state of the science behind it, I'd say either it's not isomorphic to the Illuminati, or the Illuminati must exist.
You and @FirmWeird do make a solid point. I would note that the dissent against TQ and blank-slate is substantially larger and higher-brow than UFOlogy despite the efforts to stamp it out, but this is a weaker argument than the one I made. Mea culpa.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think you really need to make that conspiracy isomorphic to the illuminati. The heredity of intelligence and other mental characteristics is nakedly obvious to everyone who even takes a cursory look, but research on the topic has been pretty effectively suppressed without the need for any kind of HBD illuminati.
More options
Context Copy link
Playing devil's advocate here- are any of them built in countries that aren't core western allies(NATO+ANZAC+Japan+SK)?
More options
Context Copy link
And yet, history is replete with nations making fundamental scientific discoveries before anyone else and using those to their advantage militarily before their competitors catch up. One way we know that this has happened in the US is that a scientist makes a breakthrough that could be militarily useful, that breakthrough is then immediately classified, and then other scientists are briefed in and conduct classified research and development based on the breakthrough. That can give you a significant first mover advantage because everyone else is still at the starting line, waiting to discover the fundamental breakthrough, and you're racing forward.
Also the entire premise of this situation is that it wasn't successfully concealed and China now has it as well.
Can you point to some in the last century? It's gotten harder over time, after all.
Atomic weapons and radar stealth are the two biggest examples.
I think laser-projected plasma generation is another that hasn't been declassified yet.
Atomic weapons are specifically the case I was thinking of where this wasn't true; the basic science of the neutron-induced-fission chain reaction was known to all parties in WWII (hence the Uranverein). The Manhattan Project was an engineering project to build a working device.
I don't know as much about the history of radar stealth.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Right – the article postulates charged superconductors to repel the magnetic field as needed. (It specifically doesn't postulate room-temperature superconductors, which I find interesting. I'd be surprised if the US government was mining antimatter in the Van Allen belts and storing it in Area 51, but not if they had stumbled on a room-temp superconductor. Maybe I'm out of touch?)
Presumably you could just thrust against the magnetic field at an angle, yeah?
And when you see "balloon holding still in 120 knot winds" what do you think?
These are both fairly plausible. We're not that far from a room-temperature superconductor; there are materials currently thought to do it under diamond-anvil-cell pressure, and then it's just a matter of engineering to build something that can sustain that pressure while letting current in (i.e. fabricating large diamonds enclosing the stuff while doping part of it enough to conduct). And that's worst-case; there might be something better. As for antimatter, I'm not sure you can get high enough with balloons, but military orbital launches aren't that rare.
I'd be somewhat surprised by either, but there's no obvious reason either'd be a Can't Happen.
Nope. Meissner effect always pushes from stronger field to weaker field, and at any point on the Earth's surface that direction is fixed. Ferromagnets pull in the opposite direction.
As I noted, tacking is a thing; you can sail in (almost) any direction despite the fixed wind direction at any given time, because you can use a boat's keel to prevent movement in one direction (sideways) while allowing it in another (forward/back). But a sphere specifically can't do this, because it's symmetrical; it offers the same drag in all directions. Also, now that I think of it, the ability to tack into the wind is also reliant on being able to angle the sails, and I don't think you could do that here.
Tether(s). Or engine(s), I suppose, although technically that would make it an airship and not a balloon. Again, though, you really want ground-crew observations to rule out optical illusions regarding movement (even then there are still some possible ones).
Come to think of it, this is a great use for the X-37!
Okay. But (and bear with me, it's a long time since I've been in college physics) – you can use magnetic fields for both suspension and propulsion – this is how maglevs work, using linear induction motors – right? The difference here would be that Earth's gravity field isn't an alternating set of magnetic polar forces, but but if you were activating electromagnets on different ends of a sphere, wouldn't that generate linear motion just the same?
I guess this wouldn't technically only be using the Meissner effect. But then again, granting you can pump enough power remotely to a bundle of superconductors to keep it afloat (which maybe we shouldn't grant, for several reasons, but I like pushing these ideas to see how far they will go) perhaps it might be simpler to turn to ionic thrust, which another poster mentioned.
Presumably it would be the engines, as the lil guys were clocked going supersonic. (Graves doesn't specify, but I assume he's making that judgment off of radar data and not Mk 1 eyeball observation.)
It was definitely doing something up there for 900+ days, but the antimatter mining thing is probably not it. There are only ten kilowatt hours worth of antimatter in the entire van allen belts.
Yeah, I don't literally think the X-37 is mining antimatter. But if you were trying to mine antimatter in the Van Allen belts, the X-37 would be the platform to do it.
Of course if it was me, I would mine antimatter from bananas under the cover of being a zoo.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, sure, there are ways and means to thrust. Like I said at the start, I'd totally believe pulse detonation and nuclear-thermal jets (for the latter, basically take a jet engine - turboprop, turbofan, turbojet, ramjet - and replace the combustion chamber heating the air with a small air-cooled nuclear reactor; now you have a jet that doesn't need refueling for months). They built one of the latter in the Cold War (Project Pluto).
Ion thrusters and magsails should be physically plausible, too, although I'd assign lower probability simply because TTBOMK they've got inferior performance to more-conventional propulsion (in atmosphere, at least; space is a whole different kettle of fish).
The reason "sphere" makes me think "balloon" is because balloons are one of the few cases where spherical shape makes sense, although I suppose if you wanted to troll people you might choose a suboptimal shape to confuse.
There are some interesting drone designs ("SpICED" and "ZeRONE") that are propelled balloons that greatly resemble the reported "metallic orbs," and from what I understand (besides using the spherical balloon shape because they are balloons) they use the spherical balloon shape because it gives them a lot of maneuverability when fitted with thrusters. But it seems like these are mostly designed for indoor use, although I wouldn't be surprised if designs along those lines are responsible for more-than-zero "UAP" sightings.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link