I do not know Esperanto, but have had some interest in its history, adoption, and current state. I do rely on the analyses offered by others of evident expertise.
Esperanto was invented by an opthamologist, L. L. Zamenhof, to be a universal second (and maybe eventually first) language that would overcome the "curse of Babel", so many different tongues in use that people cannot communicate. Being an artificial language there would be one codified grammar that everyone would use instead of the many dialectical variations seen in natural languages.
Only Zamenhof, while multi-lingual, was no linguist and did a mediocre job of designing the language. In his (partial) defense he was one of the first to try this (there were a few earlier projects), artificial language design was not trendy the way it seems today.
And so for a universal, common language Esperanto has had a tendency to generate new dialects (Ido, Romániço, etc.) often due the inadequacies of Zamenhof's original specification.
There are a number of significant design flaws that make this "easy to learn" language unnecessarily hard. The transitivity of verbs for example requires memorizing the semi-arbitrary rule assignments for hundreds of verbs, and most Esperanto users make frequent errors. Also the actual interpretation of verbs was not properly defined by Zamenhof, whether they express tenses (past, present, future) or aspects (whether it is completed or on-going). Zamenhof apparently did not understand the distinction himself and wrote contradictory things. In fact his grammar is often vague and numerous controversies have developed over the years.
Then there was the wholly unnecessary inclusion of gender for nouns. Zamenhof apparently did this because the languages he was familiar with did this, but the gender assignments are arbitrary, add nothing of a value to the language, require memorization, and are a problem that must be decided with each newly coined word. As a result the language in use has diverged from the official grammar and dictionary, with the conversion of most "male" gendered words to neutral. And this has led to a dialectical split in the language with people who want to simply eliminate gender (or at least the male gender) and those that want to preserve the original specification (such as it is).
Or to simplify the point further: it is impossible for workers to under-price robots and self-service in the long-run, or the medium-run, or increasingly now even the short-run.
There is no "dirt-cheap labor" solution to dealing with the increasing automation of work.
CEOs want dirt cheap labor and they want robots to eliminate it at the same time. They aren't offering a deal - keep wages low and we will leave the jobs intact. They have no intention of doing that, and there is no actual promise being made by "Jack in the Box CEO Leonard Comma" to not automate if wages are not raised. Like those Carrier jobs that went to Mexico six months after they announced they were being "saved" a press release is not a deal, it is not a contract, it is not even a promise. It means nothing.
Obama didn't do this, Bush didn't do it, Clinton didn't do it.
Clinton -- repeal of Glass-Steagall act (a gold mine for wall street)
Get real dude
Indeed, get real.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall was accomplished by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) authored by three hard right Republicans. it passed both Houses of Congress with veto proof majorities (Senate 90–8, House 362–57). Although it got majority support among Democrats, support was nearly unanimous from Republicans.
Clinton could have vetoed it, but it would have done no good, the veto would have been over-ridden.
Assigning blame to Clinton for repealing Glass-Steagall is torturing the facts beyond all recognition.
All this commentary about Ajit Pai and not one mention of the giant Reese's candy coffee mug that Pai so ossentatiously flourishes?
Gosh, you'd think that that prop does not establish him as a bona fide "regular guy"! What's a predatory CEO, now fox-in-the-regulatory-henhouse handing out favors to his former (and again future) employer, to do?
The first solution is to tax plastic packaging to make it significantly less attractive to use it for single-use applications. Once you artificially inflate that cost to reduce volume, you can likely burn a good part of it for energy, or subsidize recycling costs.
Right now we are artificially reducing costs by not including the externality of waste disposal (often just of the packaging itself) in the cost of the product. In some areas waste disposal costs are being added to products (engine oil, tires, auto batteries, electronics) already. If these costs are imposed based on the packaging used, more intelligent packaging choices are likely to be made.
Huh? Yes there is. It is economically cheaper to recycle aluminum than it is to process from ore.
No, if it weren't for the CRV then few people would recycle cans. It wouldn't be worth the effort to pick them up off the ground.
So, having aluminum cans (which never deteriorate) littering the ground is not a problem for you? Do you live in one of those third world garbage "cities"?
Given that we are not all disposing of our aluminum by throwing it on the ground, then melting it down is indeed a profitable activity.
3.5 million Americans are employed as professional truck drivers and will be out of work when self-driving freight trucks hit the roads.
And then there are all those businesses that provide services to all those truck drivers. When the trucks stop only for (automated) refueling an entire business sector will die.
It did have much higher ridership a decade ago, 7.9 million in 2007, sure the Great Recession made a huge impact in 2008, but why did ridership not come back? What happened in the intervening years?
Too late to reroute it now, but bringing it in close to the strip so that it was easy to board as a taxi would have been a really, really good idea. Have a people-mover in the casino take you right to the boarding platform. It should have been integrated into the entertainment spectacle environment, becoming part of the attractions.
And go to the dam airport! Geeze, how stupid can you get? Same with the LA Metro Green Line, that reaches the perimeter fence of LAX then veers away. Being able to use an urban rail system from the airport where you arrive and depart, to your hotel and destination sites, is an enormous advantage. The Washington Metro does this, and it greatly magnified its value and ridership. Adding an extension to McCarran is at least a possibility for the Las Vegas system.
In 1930 there were 4 billion movie tickets sold in the U.S., with a population of 123 million, or about 32 tickets per person. In 2017 only 1.26 billion tickets were sold, or about 4 tickets per person.
Wow! The movie industry is in dire straits, 87 years of steep decline!
This is ridiculous of course. The movie-related entertainment industry is radically different from 1930, with different pricing models for tickets, many revenue streams from each property (overseas revenue often topic domestic, DVD/Blu-Ray sales, merchandising, cable, streaming, etc). Today a movie may get "green lighted" without any expectation that it will make its costs in domestic theater runs, based on the other sources of revenue that will be generated.
More than a decade ago studios stopped regarding DVDs as the enemy of theater revenue and began treating the theater release as a promo for DVD sales. Instead of leaving a long gap between theater run and the DVD release they brought them close together.
Notice that despite this drop in ticket sales, revenues are up due to higher prices. They aren't just jacking up prices - there is a (continuing) transformation of the movie-going experience.
I live in the Los Angeles area, so I am likely seeing the leading edge of this transformation -- but the major cinemaplexes here are providing much cushier and roomy seating with recliners and swinging tables, and assigned seating which you can buy on-line. You don't have to get to the theater early to get a good seat, or seats together, you have those seats guaranteed any time you show up. Theaters have also upgraded their food, offering a bar and a menu you can order from, having the food brought straight to your seat. More expensive, but a much nicer experience.
With everyone having a large 2K or 4K TV, and fancy audio if they want, and upsampling DVD players and Bluray, and now streaming options, unless a movie is some sort of "must see" cultural event, there is little motivation to spend extra bucks to go to the theater -- unless you want that luxurious premium entertainment experience.
Satellite Insurance is commonly used. Having a launch failure pay for the payload is very unusual. Maybe the launch contract should have a "really stupid mistake" clause wherein they pay for the satellite (or else the insurance premium) if it the accident is not due to an unavoidable hardware failure.
If and when self-driving cars really become a thing, vandalism of street signs will probably have to be elevated to a felony with a mandatory minimums, even if no one gets hurt. It'll also have to be something where minors can be charged as adults because they're the ones who probably do the majority of it, and you know there will be teens who'll think it's funny to cause a 10 car pile up.
As others here note, traffic disruption pranks aren't a big problem now even though stealing signs, or introducing obstacles is already possible.
No defense against attempts to disrupt traffic is going to cover all cases, but an excellent one already implementable for all self-driving systems should be obvious.
Self-driving cars aren't navigating a blind road grid, they already have virtually complete maps of the entire road system. Give each car a database of the location of all signs in existence. Humans need signs to inform them of the traffic law in effect at an intersection (for example) computerized systems do not.
Fitbit doesnâ(TM)t integrate with Apple HomeKit and that is a reason to pass over it for another smart watch. Yet all smart watches have incredibly bad battery life. A 20$ watch lasts a year on a battery.
More like three years on a lithium battery in my experience (if you don't hit the backlight often).
A PR start for somebody, perhaps, but not NASA. According to the New Scientist article the 2016 funding bill required them to perform such a study - even writing the performance and launch date into the legislation (because that works so well with other projects, right?)
So NASA produced the required study.
It was required by law to describe a 10% c mission to be launched in 2069.
This is the account given by the New Scientist article:
The impetus came from a 2016 US funding bill telling NASA to study interstellar travel that could reach at least 10 per cent of the speed of light by 2069.
“It’s very nebulous,” says Anthony Freeman at JPL, who presented the mission concept at the 2017 American Geophysical Union conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 12 December.
In other words NASA was directed in a funding bill to study interstellar travel, with the launch date and performance mandated in the legislation! And NASA's response to this requirement imposed by lawmakers is to offer a "very nebulous" study.
Nothing to see here, just a beleaguered agency trying to address a ridiculous idea from a space nutter lawmaker.
The very first UFO in the modern sense, believed by some to be an unexplainable artifact descending from the sky of alien origin, was due to a highly classified high altitude balloon project, Project Mogul, created for monitoring nuclear weapon tests. One of these balloons came down in Roswell, New Mexico and the government tried to explain it away as a "weather balloon". Well, it was a balloon, but not a "weather balloon" and the odd (and classified) instrumentation belied the attempt to give it a prosaic explanation.
So the very first UFO event, identified with "aliens", and which set the pattern for subsequent reports, was a government cover-up of a secret program. But nothing to do with aliens.
"According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States."
So a large number of UFO sightings over a decade or so were secret government programs, which of course the government declined to identify.
Black programs developing secret hardware is real. Area 51 are real. They really are developing secret devices of different kinds. Only very limited groups of people are cleared to know about them. If fighter pilots view such a device, they will never know what they saw, in fact no one in their entire command will be cleared to know about it, nor people collecting anomalous reports. So unexplained detections of strange (real) objects should occur from time to time.
In other words, we know that there will be secret programs that result in UFO observations from time to time!
ANd then there are a whol raft of other causes you left off of your list:
Misperceptions of ordinary objects (very common, any one can find themselves fooled from time to time, even "trained observers")
Natural phenomena that are odd or even unknown. We only discovered sprites in 1989. Terrestrial gamma ray flashes were first observed in 1994. Ball lightning was reliably recorded only a few years ago.
Sensor system malfunctions
Hoaxes of all kinds. These range faked pictures, people pulling pranks with all manner of lights, lasers, balloons, aircraft, helicopters, and now (ubiquitously) drones. And people simply making stuff up. A trained observer lying? No! Never ever happens!
Every one of these is far higher in probability (given that we have proof they occur frequently) than your A through E. I am surprised you didn't at least give "We live in a simulation" as an option.
This story is getting flogged to death by click bait sites and nutters trying to turn a scam, with multiple scammers, into "Aliens!"
But let's look at what the news reports really show.
That secret "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program" first reported in the New York Times? Here is what that NYT says:
The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow.
So, this program existed because a powerful politician - wanting to channel millions of dollars to a rich friend - 'requested' that it be created.
Meanwhile the Mr. Elizondo who led this program just retired and is now talking about it openly. This even though "Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.", in other words he is talking openly about an on-going program that he is supposedly highly classified. What is Mr. Elizondo up to now? Why this:
Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.
So now he is making (err, raising) money off of his claims in a private commercial venture!
I looked at the video released to support his claims and is posted on-line (the only one available last I checked, although he is claiming to have released three). The image in the cockpit display (assuming it is authentic and not doctored in any way) stays dead center the whole time in the display as it moves in the sky. We never see (as the Washington Post story would have it): "The strange aircraft... appear to hover briefly before sprinting away at speeds that elicit gasps and shouts from the pilots." That is not on the video. Why not, if they have this amazing evidence?
We could *already* get to it, if we really wanted. Dawn has reached a 10 km/s delta-v even with primitive ion thrusters and simple solar panels. With the DS4G thrusters currently in development, you could do twenty times as much.
You should say "If we want to be ready to do it next time we see one of these, we can be."
Doesn't help us this time.
It is asking a bit much to expect us to have an advanced mission to launch designed to intercept something we have never seen before. But if its natural then there will be more, and if not "they come in threes" (that's a joke, but not really - either way, why should this be the only one?).
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally read answer 2 here.
I do not know Esperanto, but have had some interest in its history, adoption, and current state. I do rely on the analyses offered by others of evident expertise.
There is no grammatical gender in Esperanto.
Yes and no. A treatment of this issue can be found here. This goes to the issue of how well designed and specified the language was in the first place.
Esperanto was invented by an opthamologist, L. L. Zamenhof, to be a universal second (and maybe eventually first) language that would overcome the "curse of Babel", so many different tongues in use that people cannot communicate. Being an artificial language there would be one codified grammar that everyone would use instead of the many dialectical variations seen in natural languages.
Only Zamenhof, while multi-lingual, was no linguist and did a mediocre job of designing the language. In his (partial) defense he was one of the first to try this (there were a few earlier projects), artificial language design was not trendy the way it seems today.
And so for a universal, common language Esperanto has had a tendency to generate new dialects (Ido, Romániço, etc.) often due the inadequacies of Zamenhof's original specification.
There are a number of significant design flaws that make this "easy to learn" language unnecessarily hard. The transitivity of verbs for example requires memorizing the semi-arbitrary rule assignments for hundreds of verbs, and most Esperanto users make frequent errors. Also the actual interpretation of verbs was not properly defined by Zamenhof, whether they express tenses (past, present, future) or aspects (whether it is completed or on-going). Zamenhof apparently did not understand the distinction himself and wrote contradictory things. In fact his grammar is often vague and numerous controversies have developed over the years.
Then there was the wholly unnecessary inclusion of gender for nouns. Zamenhof apparently did this because the languages he was familiar with did this, but the gender assignments are arbitrary, add nothing of a value to the language, require memorization, and are a problem that must be decided with each newly coined word. As a result the language in use has diverged from the official grammar and dictionary, with the conversion of most "male" gendered words to neutral. And this has led to a dialectical split in the language with people who want to simply eliminate gender (or at least the male gender) and those that want to preserve the original specification (such as it is).
Or to simplify the point further: it is impossible for workers to under-price robots and self-service in the long-run, or the medium-run, or increasingly now even the short-run.
There is no "dirt-cheap labor" solution to dealing with the increasing automation of work.
CEOs want dirt cheap labor and they want robots to eliminate it at the same time. They aren't offering a deal - keep wages low and we will leave the jobs intact. They have no intention of doing that, and there is no actual promise being made by "Jack in the Box CEO Leonard Comma" to not automate if wages are not raised. Like those Carrier jobs that went to Mexico six months after they announced they were being "saved" a press release is not a deal, it is not a contract, it is not even a promise. It means nothing.
I have fiber at the end of my street, but unless Spectrum decides to spend $150K ...
You must have a very long street. Suburban installation cost for in-ground fiber are usually $50,000/mile or so.
Writing also.
The good old days?
Obama didn't do this, Bush didn't do it, Clinton didn't do it.
Clinton -- repeal of Glass-Steagall act (a gold mine for wall street)
Get real dude
Indeed, get real.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall was accomplished by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA) authored by three hard right Republicans. it passed both Houses of Congress with veto proof majorities (Senate 90–8, House 362–57). Although it got majority support among Democrats, support was nearly unanimous from Republicans.
Clinton could have vetoed it, but it would have done no good, the veto would have been over-ridden.
Assigning blame to Clinton for repealing Glass-Steagall is torturing the facts beyond all recognition.
Yet.
All this commentary about Ajit Pai and not one mention of the giant Reese's candy coffee mug that Pai so ossentatiously flourishes?
Gosh, you'd think that that prop does not establish him as a bona fide "regular guy"! What's a predatory CEO, now fox-in-the-regulatory-henhouse handing out favors to his former (and again future) employer, to do?
The first solution is to tax plastic packaging to make it significantly less attractive to use it for single-use applications. Once you artificially inflate that cost to reduce volume, you can likely burn a good part of it for energy, or subsidize recycling costs.
Right now we are artificially reducing costs by not including the externality of waste disposal (often just of the packaging itself) in the cost of the product. In some areas waste disposal costs are being added to products (engine oil, tires, auto batteries, electronics) already. If these costs are imposed based on the packaging used, more intelligent packaging choices are likely to be made.
Huh? Yes there is. It is economically cheaper to recycle aluminum than it is to process from ore.
No, if it weren't for the CRV then few people would recycle cans. It wouldn't be worth the effort to pick them up off the ground.
So, having aluminum cans (which never deteriorate) littering the ground is not a problem for you? Do you live in one of those third world garbage "cities"?
Given that we are not all disposing of our aluminum by throwing it on the ground, then melting it down is indeed a profitable activity.
3.5 million Americans are employed as professional truck drivers and will be out of work when self-driving freight trucks hit the roads.
And then there are all those businesses that provide services to all those truck drivers. When the trucks stop only for (automated) refueling an entire business sector will die.
It did have much higher ridership a decade ago, 7.9 million in 2007, sure the Great Recession made a huge impact in 2008, but why did ridership not come back? What happened in the intervening years?
Too late to reroute it now, but bringing it in close to the strip so that it was easy to board as a taxi would have been a really, really good idea. Have a people-mover in the casino take you right to the boarding platform. It should have been integrated into the entertainment spectacle environment, becoming part of the attractions.
And go to the dam airport! Geeze, how stupid can you get? Same with the LA Metro Green Line, that reaches the perimeter fence of LAX then veers away. Being able to use an urban rail system from the airport where you arrive and depart, to your hotel and destination sites, is an enormous advantage. The Washington Metro does this, and it greatly magnified its value and ridership. Adding an extension to McCarran is at least a possibility for the Las Vegas system.
In 1930 there were 4 billion movie tickets sold in the U.S., with a population of 123 million, or about 32 tickets per person. In 2017 only 1.26 billion tickets were sold, or about 4 tickets per person.
Wow! The movie industry is in dire straits, 87 years of steep decline!
This is ridiculous of course. The movie-related entertainment industry is radically different from 1930, with different pricing models for tickets, many revenue streams from each property (overseas revenue often topic domestic, DVD/Blu-Ray sales, merchandising, cable, streaming, etc). Today a movie may get "green lighted" without any expectation that it will make its costs in domestic theater runs, based on the other sources of revenue that will be generated.
More than a decade ago studios stopped regarding DVDs as the enemy of theater revenue and began treating the theater release as a promo for DVD sales. Instead of leaving a long gap between theater run and the DVD release they brought them close together.
Notice that despite this drop in ticket sales, revenues are up due to higher prices. They aren't just jacking up prices - there is a (continuing) transformation of the movie-going experience.
I live in the Los Angeles area, so I am likely seeing the leading edge of this transformation -- but the major cinemaplexes here are providing much cushier and roomy seating with recliners and swinging tables, and assigned seating which you can buy on-line. You don't have to get to the theater early to get a good seat, or seats together, you have those seats guaranteed any time you show up. Theaters have also upgraded their food, offering a bar and a menu you can order from, having the food brought straight to your seat. More expensive, but a much nicer experience.
With everyone having a large 2K or 4K TV, and fancy audio if they want, and upsampling DVD players and Bluray, and now streaming options, unless a movie is some sort of "must see" cultural event, there is little motivation to spend extra bucks to go to the theater -- unless you want that luxurious premium entertainment experience.
I actually do not think...
See, you could have stopped right there.
They were assuming that the reality distortion field would sweep away the snow.
Satellite Insurance is commonly used. Having a launch failure pay for the payload is very unusual. Maybe the launch contract should have a "really stupid mistake" clause wherein they pay for the satellite (or else the insurance premium) if it the accident is not due to an unavoidable hardware failure.
If and when self-driving cars really become a thing, vandalism of street signs will probably have to be elevated to a felony with a mandatory minimums, even if no one gets hurt. It'll also have to be something where minors can be charged as adults because they're the ones who probably do the majority of it, and you know there will be teens who'll think it's funny to cause a 10 car pile up.
As others here note, traffic disruption pranks aren't a big problem now even though stealing signs, or introducing obstacles is already possible.
No defense against attempts to disrupt traffic is going to cover all cases, but an excellent one already implementable for all self-driving systems should be obvious.
Self-driving cars aren't navigating a blind road grid, they already have virtually complete maps of the entire road system. Give each car a database of the location of all signs in existence. Humans need signs to inform them of the traffic law in effect at an intersection (for example) computerized systems do not.
Fitbit doesnâ(TM)t integrate with Apple HomeKit and that is a reason to pass over it for another smart watch. Yet all smart watches have incredibly bad battery life. A 20$ watch lasts a year on a battery.
More like three years on a lithium battery in my experience (if you don't hit the backlight often).
A PR start for somebody, perhaps, but not NASA. According to the New Scientist article the 2016 funding bill required them to perform such a study - even writing the performance and launch date into the legislation (because that works so well with other projects, right?)
So NASA produced the required study.
It was required by law to describe a 10% c mission to be launched in 2069.
Your dollars at work, as directed by legislators.
This is the account given by the New Scientist article:
The impetus came from a 2016 US funding bill telling NASA to study interstellar travel that could reach at least 10 per cent of the speed of light by 2069.
“It’s very nebulous,” says Anthony Freeman at JPL, who presented the mission concept at the 2017 American Geophysical Union conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 12 December.
In other words NASA was directed in a funding bill to study interstellar travel, with the launch date and performance mandated in the legislation! And NASA's response to this requirement imposed by lawmakers is to offer a "very nebulous" study.
Nothing to see here, just a beleaguered agency trying to address a ridiculous idea from a space nutter lawmaker.
Yes, exactly. He has a business venture to promote. We don't need aliens to explain this.
F. Secret government program.
The very first UFO in the modern sense, believed by some to be an unexplainable artifact descending from the sky of alien origin, was due to a highly classified high altitude balloon project, Project Mogul, created for monitoring nuclear weapon tests. One of these balloons came down in Roswell, New Mexico and the government tried to explain it away as a "weather balloon". Well, it was a balloon, but not a "weather balloon" and the odd (and classified) instrumentation belied the attempt to give it a prosaic explanation.
So the very first UFO event, identified with "aliens", and which set the pattern for subsequent reports, was a government cover-up of a secret program. But nothing to do with aliens.
This CIA report
states that:
"According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States."
So a large number of UFO sightings over a decade or so were secret government programs, which of course the government declined to identify.
Black programs developing secret hardware is real. Area 51 are real. They really are developing secret devices of different kinds. Only very limited groups of people are cleared to know about them. If fighter pilots view such a device, they will never know what they saw, in fact no one in their entire command will be cleared to know about it, nor people collecting anomalous reports. So unexplained detections of strange (real) objects should occur from time to time.
In other words, we know that there will be secret programs that result in UFO observations from time to time!
ANd then there are a whol raft of other causes you left off of your list:
Every one of these is far higher in probability (given that we have proof they occur frequently) than your A through E. I am surprised you didn't at least give "We live in a simulation" as an option.
This story is getting flogged to death by click bait sites and nutters trying to turn a scam, with multiple scammers, into "Aliens!"
But let's look at what the news reports really show.
That secret "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program" first reported in the New York Times? Here is what that NYT says:
The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow.
So, this program existed because a powerful politician - wanting to channel millions of dollars to a rich friend - 'requested' that it be created.
Meanwhile the Mr. Elizondo who led this program just retired and is now talking about it openly. This even though "Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.", in other words he is talking openly about an on-going program that he is supposedly highly classified. What is Mr. Elizondo up to now? Why this:
Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.
So now he is making (err, raising) money off of his claims in a private commercial venture!
I looked at the video released to support his claims and is posted on-line (the only one available last I checked, although he is claiming to have released three). The image in the cockpit display (assuming it is authentic and not doctored in any way) stays dead center the whole time in the display as it moves in the sky. We never see (as the Washington Post story would have it): "The strange aircraft ... appear to hover briefly before sprinting away at speeds that elicit gasps and shouts from the pilots." That is not on the video. Why not, if they have this amazing evidence?
We could *already* get to it, if we really wanted. Dawn has reached a 10 km/s delta-v even with primitive ion thrusters and simple solar panels. With the DS4G thrusters currently in development, you could do twenty times as much.
You should say "If we want to be ready to do it next time we see one of these, we can be."
Doesn't help us this time.
It is asking a bit much to expect us to have an advanced mission to launch designed to intercept something we have never seen before. But if its natural then there will be more, and if not "they come in threes" (that's a joke, but not really - either way, why should this be the only one?).