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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 - 09:42am Mar 31, 2003 EST (# 10830 of 10832)
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.

Fractals, which are mathematical objects - from a virtual world - that can be mapped to things we can see - repeat again and again, at different levels. If we're to keep our tempers, and sort things out - it makes sense to think about them in fairly neutral terms - the same intellectual problems are harder in the more important cases where our emotions are involved.

Fractals show order. So do real things - but real things involve both order and disorder. In different ways, at different levels, coexisting, sometimes in tension, but without real contradiction.

People have limited, but real power to shape the order they live with and live within.

Some things go from chaos to a more orderly state - and that can be very beautiful or unbeautiful, from different perspectives. Disciplined Beauty http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/157

Lots of things are disorderly, or statistical, or totally chaotic, or totally orderly, at different scales - without contradiction.

A beach is an example. Perfectly orderly in some ways, at some scales - or nearly so - disordered at others. Diverse. Without contradition.

Table salt contains some similar examples - perhaps a little more focused. Each of the many crystals is very nearly a perfect crystal - and if one were to somehow set up x-y-z coordinates oriented with that crystal - over a range there would be very nearly perfect order, atom by atom.

Then an "unexpected" discontinuity.

And then another crystal, with the same order - an order most conveniently displayed, atom-by-atom by another orientation of x-y-z coordinates.

To try to set up one frame of reference to discribe the orderly placement of Na and Cl atoms in the salt would be an enormous and inherently messy description job. Complex. Awkward. But without contradiction.

The salt crystals, at some scales, are almost perfectly orderly. At some other levels, almost perfectly random - statistical - disordered. And orderly at some yet larger scales - to a significant but not perfect degree.

A beach is orderly and disorderly in some analogous ways - and some other ways - but is both more messy and more complex.

10434 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.suMzacrK67p.2482449@.f28e622/11983 and 10442 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.suMzacrK67p.2482449@.f28e622/11991 both refer to a vital distinction between valid statements in different frames of reference and muddle.

(We know a lot practical about the information processing needed to handle near real world complexity today, and much of it is illustrated in the image processing done in movies such as Toy Story http://www.pixar.com/featurefilms/index.html , which use fancy image processing such as that packaged in Pixar's RenderMan https://renderman.pixar.com/ )

One can believe in absolute truth about basic things - especially basic physical things - and facts about real events - including facts about interconnections - and yet acknowledge that there can be many different perspectives about these facts - many different cultural views of these facts. Many maps. Many valid maps.

It is important to be able to tell the difference between different perspectives and muddle or lies.

- - -

If we know that, we can define necessary fights - most of them small fights - and avoid most of the ugliness of human conflict.

If leaders of nation states only had a little courage - we'd be so close to a safer, more just world. Right now.

There are basic incompatibilities between Islamic and European culture - that won't change, and probably shouldn't. We have very different notions of order - and value different orders. Differently.

But both t

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