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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4001 thread views

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?

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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.

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