New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 11:23am May 1, 2003 EST (# 11449 of 11500)
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.

27 billion dollars is a "small" amount of money by some standards - but it dwarfs the current UN budget.

It is too much money to come reliably from donors.

It is ugly for such a sum to be a matter of donation.

The cost of public health - at the level needed for about $30/person for the basics - is a recurring cost. A chronic need - basic but not dramatic. It needs to be supported in a routine way.

Last year, world crude oil purchases were about 800 billion dollars. An international tax on international oil flows, sufficient to pay for the basic health care needs should be justified. If that tax were administered by the UN, and money raised limited to health care - the fictitious "rate of return" the editorial cites would become a real rate of return. The world would be a significantly more beautiful, less ugly place.

If enough people wanted to get such a thing done, it could be done.

(Arguments against the proposal, stated coherently, publicly, and in detail, might make interesting reading. And might make for a better solution.)

We, as a species, can be beautiful, courageous, sensible, good - even "better than good" --- Of Altruism, Heroism and Evolution's Gifts in the Face of Terror By NATALIE ANGIER http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/18/health/psychology/18ALTR.html

Angier quotes Wilson of SUNY:

" It's been shown pretty well that where people place the boundary between us and them is extremely flexible and strategic," he said. "It's possible to widen the moral circle, and I'm optimistic enough to believe it can be done on a worldwide scale."

With needs as great as the needs of world health, the "moral circle" ought to be wide enough for us to come to simple and routine solutions.

Not solutions that require conscious altruism (or conscious decision making) every year, or at every step - important routine things need to be handled more efficiently than that.

That means, from time to time, setting up institutions, and routine ways to fund them, staff them, and oversee them. With enough resources to do the job on a routine basis.

That shouldn't be a matter of charity, but of taxes.

rshow55 - 11:31am May 1, 2003 EST (# 11450 of 11500)
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.

If a tax was instituted, and the revenues allocated for health care were subject to reasonably honest bookeeping - there would be an additional benefit that might be almost as important as the direct health benefit.

Important as the health benefit obviously is, if we share any common feeling for each other at all.

Most of the problems in the world, now and for some time past, are "obvious" problems - with "obvious" barriers standing in the way of solution.

The funding of minimal public health expenditures is a clear example, and perhaps the most important and "obvious" one. But there are other huge problems - including matters of war and peace, that are "obvious" too.

The facts of public health, well understood, ought to produce reasonable responses. Other facts, clearly faced, ought to produce reasonable responses, too.

The circumstances in North Korea are crazy, by any coherent accounting that values human life.

So is the current situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

So are many if not most of the other problems garish enough to be covered by newspapers.

When one asks "why can't we do better?" there are usually clear reasons why things are as they are - most often involving human beings committed to what already is.

All the same, if more people thought more about obvious problems - according to reasonable standards, like the cash standard in The Cost of Saars http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/01/opinion/01THU3.html - a lot could get better.

lchic - 08:55pm May 1, 2003 EST (# 11451 of 11500)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

bronzed brain space - Poem

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?53@@.ee79f4e/8220

lchic - 08:59pm May 1, 2003 EST (# 11452 of 11500)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

It's interesting how the free space in the minds of 'different people' each sees 'different worlds'

wrt SARS_visionaries see a lidded box, think 'not for me' and hence their concern it is contained

box SARS and put a lid on it

not me!

(48 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense