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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 09:14am Mar 29, 2003 EST (# 10690 of 10691)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

That's the only way to plan anything - based on specific assumptions.

But the fit of the plan to what it is supposed to fit has to be checked - and the fragility of planning - its dependence on assumptions - ought to be clear.

The odds are overwhelming that any given plan is going to have to be modified to fit what it is supposed to do - there need to be SEQUENCES of plans. Such sequences, carefully done, often converge. The world would be a lot messier than it is if that wasn't true.

All anyone can ever do is make a plan according to assumptions about facts and relations - that is internally consistent - and see if it fits.

Disciplined Beauty http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/157 deals with the question does it fit?

Often, the answer is "it fits in spots, but not in some other spots" - and when that is the answer - the mistakes need to be fixed - and very often can be. REPEATEDLY fixed, repeatedly checked, repeatedly modified until the model works well enough for what it is supposed to do.

Ideas can be beautiful on the basis of some specific assumptions and ugly in terms of others without contradiction.

Muddle is just ugly.

Steve Kline, with some help from me, worked out some basic rules 6982-83 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.dkP7aVkL6jW.2168478@.f28e622/8504 and perhaps especially these:

Hypothesis II: Honor all credible data. In multidisciplinary work, we need to honor all credibile data, wherever they arise. (This includes not only data from various disciplines and from our laboratories, but also from the world itself, since we have no labs from which we can obtain data for many important purposes.

Hypothesis III: The absence of universal approaches. There is no one view, no one methodology, no one set of principles, no one set of equations that provides understanding of all matters vital to human concern.

Hypothesis IV: The necessity of system definition. Each particular truth assertion about nature implies only to some systems (and not to all.)

If people just took some time to check basics to closure - where we have more than enough data to sort things out - we'd live in a far better, richer, safer, more humane world.

10618 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.dkP7aVkL6jW.2168478@.f28e622/12168

This ought to be a hopeful time. For the US, and for the rest of the world, as well. We can do much better than we're doing.

lchic - 09:19am Mar 29, 2003 EST (# 10691 of 10691)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

GU 'Golly, we didn't expect the people of Iraq would want to defend their country! '

Guardian Talk International

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.4a910033/13

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