https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_China_balloon_incident
Resolves once China and/or the US declassifies or leaks enough information for me to be highly confident one way or the other.
It does not matter whether it was activly spying on the US, or intended to be doing so. Only whether the equipment inside and intention of its construction was to be able to spy on some country. (As opposed to a weather balloon or hobbyist balloon.)
In the event that its origin is discovered to not be the Chinise government, this resolves NO.
Related questions
@PS But also:
So, Martin asked, "Bottom line, it was a spy balloon, but it wasn't spying?"
Milley replied, "I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn't transmit any intelligence back to China."
🤔
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/29/politics/china-surveillance-balloon-pentagon-intl-hnk/index.html
@Floffinou "Steps taken by Washington to stop the high altitude device from potential information gathering as it crossed the US in early February played a role in that outcome, according to Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder.
“We believe that (the balloon) did not collect while it was transiting the United States or flying over the United States, and certainly the efforts that we made contributed,” Ryder told reporters at a briefing."
DOD seems pretty certain it was: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/china-spy-balloon-collected-intelligence-us-military-bases-rcna77155
Information on US DARPA ultra high altitude balloons:
https://www.darpa.mil/program/adaptable-lighter-than-air
Also I'm not sure if anyone remembers Alphabet's Project Loon...? https://x.company/projects/loon/
That website gives a great overview of how the technology works, it uses upper altitude air currents and ballasting to navigate. I'm skeptical of some (popular) media reports that the Chinese Spy Balloons had propellers and rudders - I see no reason for that based upon past high altitude projects that I have seen. But of course it would be interesting to know more.
I actually talked to some of the folks from the Alphabet Moonshot / Loon project years ago, around 2015 or so... they were getting their balloons from Raven in South Dakota which I have visited several times. https://aerostar.com/about/history
Raven was a spin off of General Mills as ballooning was important for agricultural observation prior to planes becoming cheaper.
@PatrickDelaney https://manifold.markets/link/IHNKf9No here is some mana.
If anyone else claims this, then I will lose just a huge amount of respect for you (unless you do it in a really funny way)
@NathanpmYoung Wow, thank you! I had no idea you could just pay mana like that. What prompted you to want to just pay me mana if I may ask?
Kind of wondering now if the Chinese military would actively send an Ultra-high astronomical balloon over the continental US which is specifically NOT a spy balloon so as to troll the US Military and Democratic system?
If it comes out that this was not a spy balloon, it erodes public trust in media, government and military intelligence claims with respect to China. This in combination with soft power tactics (TikTok), seems like a better strategy than just straight up obviously sending a spy balloon.
How would the market maker, @IsaacKing resolve this if it were found that the balloon was from a technical standpoint, "just a high altitude balloon bro," ... yet at the same time it seems that this high altitude balloon was still sent on a malicious path? Would it still default back to being a spy balloon?
The market seems slanted highly in favor of spy balloon now...but if the equipment that they find in the debris had nothing to do with ground observations, cell phone data collections and it was all just purely scientific equipment...would this resolve NO? Or would it still be able to resolve YES given the behavior and flight path of the balloon?
@PatrickDelaney Hmm. Is a fake spy balloon a spy balloon? I think not. Nothing was being spied upon.
@IsaacKing Agreed. It could be a "military balloon" maybe, or a "deception balloon", but not a "spy balloon".
Does someone has access to this? https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/02/14/china-spy-balloon-path-tracking-weather/
@IsaacKing Do you want people to just provide any arguments regardless of how speculative or do you want solid arguments backed by evidence? ;-)
@IsaacKing I'm trying to find more information which falsifies what I have posted already. One of the reasons I have read supporting the idea that this was a spy balloon, not from a mainstream source so I won't link it here, is the idea that this balloon was so huge, 200 ft tall, with a gigantic payload, 8000 lbs or more, so there is therefore no way this could be a weather balloon.
After doing some research, I found that NASA has had an ultra long duration balloon project for a long time. Here is a fascinating document about it:
So some of the NASA balloons can be quite large - I wouldn't say they are weather balloons, they are astronomical and radiation detection balloons. More:
https://www.nasa.gov/scientificballoons
Some of those NASA balloons are clearly very large, but I don't think anyone in their right mind thinks they are military balloons.
I tried to search the web in China using various techniques and the best I could come up with is this:
"The Balloon Vehicle Research Center (Balloon Center) of the Institute of Optoelectronics"
The marketing on that page suffice to say ain't got nothin' on the NASA marketing. That page appears to be super old too...like, pre-2009.
But basically I found that through looking at translated various Chinese science blogs, and they pointed to that center, and that's what they have on their page.
I tried to visit the Chinese equivalent of NASA... http://www.cnsa.gov.cn ... which was down from my location in the US - which is...extremely unnerving and I almost don't want to post that fact because who knows, it could just be an aberration.
But yeah, we can see it on the Wayback Machine, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to navigate it and translate the pages so I can't find information about any ballon project they may or may not have.
I guess any information on the Chinese internet equivalent to the NASA meteorological ultra high altitude, very large balloons would leave some room for doubt that we are being completely played by the US and Canadian Governments jointly.
At some point though, you start getting into 9-11 Truther territory and you're just reaching for some kind of conspiracy theory.
@PatrickDelaney I can access the CNSA site from the EU, not sure what that says. I don’t know Chinese though, so can’t help figure this out. 🤷♀
@Gabrielle I feel like I'm always asking you to do work on Manifold! Sorry for that. So I guess this is not really asking you to do work, but perhaps a tip on how to navigate the Chinese internet, which I think is a good skill to have...basically if you use Safari, you can click on the little icon in the right-hand side of your browser which will allow you to translate pages. Otherwise, you can use Google translate and copy and paste the entire URL into there, and click on the link generated, which will translate using Google. Safari is faster as it seems to translate locally somehow.
@PatrickDelaney While CNSA is still down where I'm at, I did a proxy check:
Whew...conspiracy theory cancelled. It's up in Oregon. It's just crappy DNS.
@PatrickDelaney Looking at what I can see on the site, it seems like the CNSA is more focused on space without the aeronautics side that NASA has. I see an article about the Fengyun meteorological satellites, so that seems somewhat related, but nothing about high altitude meteorological balloons, or anything that operates in the atmosphere.
I do see an English site (http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html), but I don't see anything about balloons there either.
That doesn't mean that they aren't weather balloons though, just that the CNSA isn't the relevant agency.
@PatrickDelaney I was able to look here through this proxy site: https://eu1.proxysite.com/process.php?d=IaSNir7c5LmcQTC%2B6%2Fe3yPoM4J1CxTZajYDE8VQ%2B29jA2Z3k0ECaGG2D18rL%2FURmpPfLSj5e7joPRHoR0Q1B8pYmOg%3D%3D&b=1&f=norefer
Translated:
The Major Project of High-Resolution Earth Observation System is a major national science and technology project deployed in the "Outline of China's Medium- and Long-term Science and Technology Development Plan (2006-2020)", and the Earth Observation and Data Center of the National Space Administration is responsible for the specific organization and implementation. The high-resolution project will build a high-resolution earth observation data acquisition system based on satellites, stratospheric airships and aircraft, improve the corresponding ground systems, and establish a data and application center. The system will be combined with other observation methods to form an all-weather, all-time, global-coverage earth observation capability. By 2020, an advanced land, atmosphere, and ocean earth observation system will be built to provide modern agriculture, disaster reduction, resources and the environment. , public safety and other major areas to provide services and decision support.
There's a picture showing several of their equipment, including some blimp-looking structures.
So I guess this leaves room for some tiny bit of doubt that perhaps this was an overblown incident. E.g. perhaps it really was the Chinese NASA, CNSA launching an ultra high balloon. Part of the US Military's reasoning as to why this must have been a spy balloon is that China did not notify the US. I have no way of knowing how to find out that China did not in fact notify the US - but I think even if they didn't, there is still a slight possibility in my mind that something went very wrong at CNSA, or some part of the Chinese military influenced them somehow for some internal Chinese political games reasoning, and that all ended up in an international incident, like a Cohen brother's movie.
However I would put all of these firmly in the category of, "speculation," and I would say the much higher probability is still...if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a Chinese spy balloon, not an accident.
I would also offer up that we could look at evidence that the US military is doing the same types of things globally, I know they have been used and reported on extensively in Afghanistan. So why is it such a huge conceptual jump to see that China would do the same? https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/world/asia/in-afghanistan-spy-balloons-now-part-of-landscape.html
Requests to build a spy balloon were literally on the China PLA online procurement portal, per AP. "The U.S. has confidence that the manufacturer of the balloon shot down on Saturday has “a direct relationship with China’s military and is an approved vendor of the” army, the official said, citing an official PLA procurement portal as evidence. https://apnews.com/article/chinese-balloon-military-involvement-e45c759cb00294e83989fa35970935bc