Second guess: Some kind of reflective mylar balloons that were released from a party and drifted. This turned out to be the explanation for a similar daytime UFO sighting in Manhattan. At night, balloons of that kind can pick up light from the ground, and the slightly orange color of street lighting would account for the orange appearance as they floated up to a cloud layer and disappeared into the clouds.

However, it’s always good for people to take photos and videos of unusual objects in the sky. If the object is an aircraft in distress and heading for a crash, your photos/videos could help figure out what happened. If the object is a meteor, your photos/videos could help scientists who track meteors, and if it strikes the Earth, could help to locate it so it can be analyzed.

And there’s always the slim possibility that one of these things (or a cluster of them, as the case may be) could turn out to be extraterrestrial technology, for example robotic probes similar to the ones we have launched into the solar system. A civilization that has solved its sustainability problems and is planning for the long term, could afford the cost and would have the time to launch large numbers of robotic devices to other star systems, at speeds in the range of a single-digit percentage of light speed. Hundreds or thousands of years later, their descendants would be around to pick up the scientific data relayed home by the devices.

Think of it this way: If we (humans) could deal with the climate crisis and the various petty conflicts that waste so much of our time and efforts, what would we do? We’d solve our human problems such as poverty and hunger, and we’d turn our attention toward global efforts to answer the big science questions. One of the things we’d likely do is start launching more robotic space missions. Eventually we’d launch interstellar probes to some of the star systems where even today we are finding planets that are likely to have life on them.

Now fast-forward a few thousand years and imagine your distant descendants being able to receive scientific data from planets in other star systems. Imagine them receiving data showing life on other worlds, whether it’s extensive plant cover, or whether it’s evidence of other technologically capable civilizations (e.g. light seen on the dark side of a planet). What an amazing thing to have bequeathed to those who come after us, right? They would look back and thank us for having given that to them.

As it is, our distant descendants will look back on us as having left them a world with a climate crisis that they would have had to solve: that we had the party and left them the mess to clean up. That’s not cool, and it’s not fair.

So if you look up in the sky and see some puzzling objects, ask yourself: what kind of world do we want to leave to our children’s children’s children (etc.) a couple of thousand years down the line? A world where they inherit a space program that helps understand important questions about life in the universe? Or a world where they inherit a nasty rotten mess of damaged ecosystems and crises that could have been prevented?

That’s the real lesson here. What we do today, makes or breaks the world for those who come after us.

Then I saw this link on Drudge. Strange!