to answer everyone's questions:
1. it is supposed to be a for fun sandbox, a 'toy' if you may
2. it can in no way become a credible source for any level of military intel
3. the altitude is at 100hPa
4. I really should add a disclaimer about how this is for fun purposes only
5. adding othe levels will give me even more data chunks, but it is certainly doable
6. I want to add (programmable) steering too! will do soon
I’m having an absolutely awful day. My Dad had to call 911 to get my stepmother the care she needed and everything just went downhill from there.
As rough as my day has been, I have spent a lot of time with your app today. It’s not perfect (of course) but I have had a lot of fun with it today. As dark as today has been, that really means a lot.
You have gotten some really solid feedback today and I can’t disagree with it. But speaking as a user, this product has made my day significantly better. Thanks for putting this out into the world.
A little bit of UX feedback: It would be great if the balloon were a draggable object, not just click once & then again, I tried to do this about 10 times before I realized: click once on the balloon and then again on the map! Or maybe edit the instructions (click balloon and then map).
Either way, I enjoyed this greatly! Thank you for building this.
I love the disclaimer "not a credible source for military intel". I know you are probably putting that to disclaim knowing where a particular balloon came from but it sounds a bit like "If you want to spy on another country, build your own simulator" - lol.
at around 60 deg south there is no land at all, causing the wind and sea current to be exteremly strong, meaning the balloon can 'circumnavigate' the globe in time as little as 5 days, it is also known as the screaming sixties
Isn't the actual distance to cover much shorter also at those latitudes, in order to 'circumnavigate' the globe? Because an equilatitude circle is much smaller.
Correct. Look at the specifics for Burt Rutan's Voyager world-record non-stop heavier-than-air circumnavigation. They specified the need to cross the equator twice in order to avoid such shenanigans, perhaps with a few more constraints.
This was really fun to mess about with. Interesting how some balloons take very similar paths for a bit, but then go on an entirely separate second stage. UK and Norway can follow a very similar path to get to the US, but then Norway's loops around Canada for a bit while the UK's head south. It's fascinating.
If you're bored and want to run mass simulations with your data I'd love to know which country is the hardest to spy on via balloon.
I wonder if there is a way to simulate a balloon in reverse, i.e. given its destination figure out which sources it could come from. Maybe it would just be a matter of reversing the winds and time? Would be interesting if it were doable.
It has a feature where you specify a target point and the origin point and it plots the changes in altitude your ballon will need to make to reach the target (if possible). Was surprising to me that if launched far enough away, a balloon can end up nearly anywhere in the US it wants just by controlling altitude.
Without any context on the page, my first impression is this is presented as a tool for people to validate certain theories such as "could a balloon released from china at some recent time and date have actually blown into the US?"
As other comments have pointed out, the lack of ability to test with different altitudes makes the tool unfit for that purpose.
That leaves an open question of what the creator is hoping people will see in this. Is it a game or toy? Is it a technical experiment? Is it art? Does the maker not care what it is to us? (but, still, I'm curious what it is to the maker)
Certainly one can think of obvious improvements - which I generally think is a sign that a tool has a lot of potential. I would put it somewhere between art and educational tool: I hadn't really thought that much about how far a balloon could drift in a given time period and this did kind of make me realize that they move pretty "fast" - around the world in 80 days? How about 80 hours.
Sometimes you just have time to make a think that has the potential to provoke further discussion and interest - which seems like what happened here.
Also, they said the balloon had "limited steering capability" which I assume means it could nudge itself in a direction or at least adjust it's altitude.
> To identify helpful wind patterns, Loon used advanced predictive models to create interactive maps of the skies. These maps allowed the team to determine the wind speed and direction at specific altitudes, times, and locations. The team then developed smart algorithms to help determine the most effective flight paths through the varying wind layers. With the aid of these algorithms, the balloons could accurately sail the winds over thousands of kilometers to reach a desired location and remain clustered around those destinations in order to deliver consistent connectivity below.
> It is possible for the balloon to change its altitude and then pick up different wind directions and velocities.
I've tried multiple different levels from 090 to 520, and it seems the deviation within level is extremely minimal.
i.e. maybe a difference between 70deg and 75deg, but if it's going in the general direction of east, there's not an altitude to turn around or even sidetrack.
Airships like a Zeppelin or blimp have some propulsive component to them that let them navigate without the wind.
A balloon can only navigate by catching different winds at different altitudes. When you can control the altitude from 60,000 feet to 120,000 feet there is a significant amount of variation in the direction of winds.
Can’t give an answer but my thought here is that this thing probably would like to be swept up before the news cycle turns and balloons aren’t a thing anymore. Looks and feels like something put together in a bit of a hurry (which is perfectly fine)
It is what you believe it to be (most of the time politically). People use it prove the theory. Other people use it to disprove. I can only see the fun with technicality on using the real data to simulate this.
Q: How would we differentiate between a spy balloon and a weather balloon?
A: Well, it's not really possible - the NRO (the highly secretive US satellite agency) makes a lot of geospatial data available to scientists for use in studying everything from forest fires to fault geology to ocean ecosystem productivity and beyond.
This has to be one of the coolest things I have seen this year on HN; last year it was the "endless acid banger".
It's tempting to let feature-creep make this bigger, but other than a few UX tweaks, it's perfect the way it is.
Then again, is there is anything I could think of for version 2.0 it would be satellite imagery from the virtual balloon (depending if Google maps allows that in their API)
update: I have now added a disclaimer that this site is aimed at for fun usage only, in case we would scream at each other over the topic of fidelity and application
This is amazing; really puts in perspective how hard it would be to say you know someone sent a balloon exactly to you, or that they didn't mean to... its something you could plan for (like this shows) and something that probably is very fickle
Only fun thing I found to do with this is race two cities' balloons around the world and back to original longitude. DC comes from behind and beats NY (at least at precise locations I selected).
Floats all the way around the world before passing within a few hundred feet of the start point. I was quite surprised when the second launch I tried turned up an (almost) eigenfloater of the matrix.
This site can be used to demonstrate how small perturbations in initial conditions led to big differences over the long run, aka: butterfly effect. Try to place to balloons near each other and you'll see how their trajectory end up differing by a lot.
It's interesting because climate modeling/forecasting with a very powerful computer could tell you where and when to drop your balloon to pass certain targets.
You should be aware that it is possible to direct your balloon pretty much anywhere by just changing the altitude.
If I was China and I wanted to make super advanced balloon to spy on US I would definitely make it so that it can use air currents at different altitudes to direct it where I want.
interesting - what is the confidence interval on this? if you start a balloon in the same spot at the same time does it always end up in the same place? or is there a wide range of where it could be
My (uninformed!) suspicion is that the confidence interval has to be very wide.
I’m worried about things like: the size and weight of the balloon, the altitude of the balloon, and very difficult to predict future changes in wind speed and direction during the course of the balloon’s flight.
If you know more than others, that's great, but then please either (1) share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn; or (2) don't post. Supercilious putdowns only make things worse.
The problem is, this “simulator” leads to very misleading conclusions because of the inability to control altitudes. It potentially fuels a false narrative that balloons drift at random and are not useful for surveillance, while Loon flew something like 40 balloons in a row to dwell over South America for sustained periods.
I’m sorry that the dismissal was short, but I did name the key problem.
If you had posted this in the first place it would have been better. Better yet would be to drop provocations like "false narrative", which implies something sinister, and just focus on contributing correct, interesting information about balloons (or whatever the topic is that you know about).
It's too easy to underestimate the impact of putdowns in internet comments by 10x, if not more—impact on the readers, on other commenters, on the site as a whole, and (if they see it) on the author or creator. When you* post putdowns it usually feels innocuous, as if you're just adding a little extra emphasis, but to the reader it often comes across as much larger than the rest of the comment put together—especially when there isn't much other information.
* I don't mean you personally of course—I mean all of us.
But it's not a shallow dismissal. It gives a feedback of a particular shortcoming that makes the whole idea very misleading -- imagine a journalist making a conclusion that there's no way a baloon could fly over US territory based on such or similar simulation.
It's possible to fix that shortcoming and make the idea useful.
It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why. When people post comments that simply dismiss what someone else has done without being explaining why or teaching the reader, that's what we mean by shallow dismissal.
Both your comment and the GP's follow-up do contain a little more explanation—that's good—but even better would be to give more: walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like.
If you just focus on what you don't like about something, how useless or dumb it is, that puts a nasty torque on conversation which is hard to get out of.
> It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why
I was a passenger in a car en route to a funeral. I felt like the post was a little troublesome and I provided what context I could in the limited time I had to reply.
I do wish I had said "deeply misleading" instead of "useless", though. Which-- deeply misleading is even worse than useless, unfortunately.
> walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like.
In this case, there's a state actor (China) deliberately conflating weather balloons and surveillance craft. Typical weather balloons drift freely and cannot maneuver; capable balloons that can control their altitude can maneuver far more freely than most people expect. "Narrative" may sound sinister, but we have a deliberate counterfactual being used in the furtherance of surveillance and geopolitical conflict.
In turn, we have this "Spy Balloon Simulator - With real atmospheric data" that makes it pretty much impossible to control a balloon. It may be an accidental misstep, but it's at the very least a somewhat dangerous one.
A more useful observation would be that without the ability to control altitude, it misleads the unknowledgeable to make erroneous conclusions about the capability of high altitude balloons to follow predetermined flight paths.
Or you could just call it what it is: A toy using a misleading description ("With real atmospheric data") that doesn't tell people its a toy. Perhaps its to be expected considering the fact that its a simple website, but still.
EDIT: I just realized the author made an account to clarify in this thread that its a toy application.
It would provide a better representation of the ability to steer the balloon.
As it is now, it suggests "you launch it and it goes somewhere randomly." But if you were able to demonstrate that it is able to steer by changing its altitude it becomes more clear that overflying an area can be a deliberate act.
Additionally, the data of "here is the current vector map for the winds at some altitude" doesn't handle the forecast of what they will be at a different location in 6 hours.
Having this as a game with "overfly these cities and score points" combined with using one month's worth of wind data and forecast information for 6h and 12h from now (rather than a point in time) would be more accurate for what it can do.
Definitely. Programs such as Google's Project Loon used altitude to access different wind profiles so that they could plan & control the balloons' paths. You see this a lot with hot air balloons: The wind at one altitude can be going the opposite direction than the wind a few hundred feet below.
On one hand, yes controlling altitude will provide better results. One quirk of balloons is that winds can move at dramatically different directions/speeds at different altitudes.
On the other hand, this seems to be a solo developer working on something for the pure challenge of it. Adding different altitudes would have dramatically increased both the work and money required to build/display this.
In other words, adding features might make it more useful if you’re purely interested in accurately forecasting balloon flight. But prematurely adding features might mean that we wouldn’t have gotten to play with it now. Would that really be an improvement? Who knows?
If you want to accurately forecast balloon flight, there are already built resources for you. But this is hacker news, let’s leave those concerns for another time and celebrate hacking.
OP, I dig balloons. This simulation isn’t perfect but you have done some really good work. Keep at it!!
to answer everyone's questions: 1. it is supposed to be a for fun sandbox, a 'toy' if you may 2. it can in no way become a credible source for any level of military intel 3. the altitude is at 100hPa 4. I really should add a disclaimer about how this is for fun purposes only 5. adding othe levels will give me even more data chunks, but it is certainly doable 6. I want to add (programmable) steering too! will do soon