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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?

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

rshow55 - 06:43pm May 9, 2003 EST (# 11550 of 11566)
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.

lchic:

If a script writer assembled information, then tried to climb inside this guy's deadHead, would it be drama filled?

Yes. And conflicted enough to make a good movie.

With literary and religious overtones.

I'm a doubter, myself, but I do appreciate the power of the creation story in Genesis. And the story following closely after of how man and woman lived happily together in the earthly paradise of the Garden of Eden till they were cast out for the sin of eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge - and especially knowledge of good and evil.

Casey was very concerned, for very practical reasons - with nuts-and-bolts level knowledge of good an evil. For instance, he wanted to know everything that was operationally effective, that any Nazi ever knew.

So did I.

He wanted me to help sort that out. I tried. It was no accident that my main math-engineering tutor, at the beginning of my work in 1967, was Wolfgang Flugge, of Stanford, who knew so much - at the mathematical and operational level, about the nuts-and-bolts of the construction of the ME262.

Some of the knowledge that the Nazis had "well worked out" was dangerous, wrenching, bracing, even humiliating knowledge for a human being to have. If that knowledge would save 100 or 200 more-or-less innocent lives an hour - keep from wasting or blighting many thousands of human lives per your - would you want it known?

I think the answer is yes.

If I could get enough clearance so that it wasn't suicidal - I could make some very good contributions to "Casey - the movie."

I began this year with this:

rshow55 - 08:20am Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7177 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.uUzPaD7W8Lb.2515274@.f28e622/8700

I think this is a year where some lessons are going to have to be learned about stability and function of international systems, in terms of basic requirements of order , symmetry , and harmony - at the levels that make sense - and learned clearly and explicitly enough to produce systems that have these properties by design, not by chance.

The lessons are fairly easy, I believe, though not difficult to screw up. A problem is that perfect stability - and complete instability - are mirror images - and issues of balance and correct signs can be, in a plain sense, matters of life and death. And cost. For individuals, and whole systems.

We're about half way through the year.

Was I wrong on January 1? I'm still not sure. I am sure that I'm doing my best, under awkward circumstances, to do the things I promised Casey I'd try to do.

And hoping actually make the world better - and get paid decently for doing it. I think I've got some back pay coming.

rshow55 - 06:51pm May 9, 2003 EST (# 11551 of 11566)
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.

Correction:

Some of the knowledge that the Nazis had "well worked out" was dangerous, wrenching, bracing, even humiliating knowledge for a human being to have. If that knowledge would save 100 or 200 more-or-less innocent lives an hour - keep from wasting or blighting many thousands of human years of life every hour - would you want it known?

I would.

- - -

We're animals. Whether you happen to be religious or not. And facts matter, because people, as individuals and as groups, have to make decisions.

The main thing we need to know is that facts matter - and when they matter enough - getting facts straight should be morally forcing.

If we knew that - and acted on it more often than we do - we could make the world a lot better.

Commondata and lchic have asked some very good questions, and I'll try to answer them clearly and honestly. The incidence of deception and self deception in the world is 10-20 times larger than most people admit - either to themselves or others. If that incidence got smaller - we could all do a lot better.

fredmoore - 11:27pm May 9, 2003 EST (# 11552 of 11566)

Dear Rshow ....

Please can I have a Ferrari for Christmas .... I've been good.

Amen

PS My brother wants one too.

lchic - 08:45am May 10, 2003 EST (# 11553 of 11566)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Medium-XXLarge?

http://webhome.idirect.com/~showdown/ferrari/index1.html

(13 following messages)

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