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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 - 09:47am Apr 5, 2003 EST (# 11138 of 11140)
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.

The basic structure of neural connections in vertebrates hasn't changed that much since the age of fishes - though it has been refined - and people are about as smart as it is physically possible for an animal to be.

Ever.

Maybe I've blown it about this judgement - but I don't see how that's possible - this is an area where I've been at it a while, and been careful. Our brains are astonishingly able - and ought to be able to do, more often, as well as they do when people are at their best.

And our brains are very flexible, too. People learn to read, for example. If you think about everything involved with that, and how unnatural the process is in some basic ways - you ought to be impressed.

The things that go wrong, for individuals and groups - are obvious if you look at them - and if you look at the people involved with them - but to sort out the problems not yet sorted, essentially every time - somebody has to face up to something that is unpleasant in some way or other.

There are relatively few such cases (millions - compared to the trillions of logical connections that people in cultures actually contrive to handle well) - but there are still plenty - and sorting them out step by step takes work - and a willingness to face "socially uncomfortable" or "emotionally uncomfortable" things - from time to time - usually tactfully.

Reading instruction - both because it often works well - and because it often involves real nightmares, real human tragedies - offers a wealth of examples.

Math instruction - which works less well, by and large - offers more.

There are many other fields that show the same basic body of relations.

rshow55 - 10:08am Apr 5, 2003 EST (# 11139 of 11140)
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.

I'm moving slowly, but here's a massive fact that I think people need to consider when they somehow tell themselves that people are "stupid."

People watch television. They see movies. They do it for pleasure.

Anybody who has looked at all at how difficult it is to put out a TV show or movie that people will actually want to watch ought to have a sense of what an enormous amount of information processing that involves.

People also make the mistakes (logical and moral) that they actually make. Babies are as stupid as they are - and as muddled and unsatisfactory as animals as they actually are.

People sort themselves out - and at the neurological level this involves an astonishing amount of processing. An amazing amount of the time, the sorting works well in every way humans can reasonably care about. In the rare cases where it doesn't - some trouble-shooting can help.

Something we're not is logical in the textbook sense. Good thing we're not.

Whether or not you happen to believe in God, whether or not you happen to believe in miracles - this seems to me essentially certain on statistical grounds.

Most things that happen are not miracles.

I don't think any reasonable God can be handling the nuts and bolts of the processing that goes on when a bat flies through a cave or catches a moth. That's fancy stuff. Or when "the average reader of The New York Times" glances at the paper. That's fancy stuff, too.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense