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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 - 06:44pm May 30, 2003 EST (# 12227 of 12253)
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.

Let's suppose - just as a "thought experiment" that after 1 million dollar investment - you would have a 90% chance of meeting those target prices - after a billion $ investment - a 99% chance - and the investment to get "up and running and competitive" was $140 billion $ - with very high rate of return. A good deal? For the world, yes:

the world would have an essentially unlimited supply of energy (transported as hydrogen) at 10$/barrel oil energy equivalent before transportation costs.

But what if a nation state had close connections with industrial interests that would lose trillions of dollars of market capitalization (based on oil reserve values) if it happened? And close connections to OPEC.

You'd be crazy to depend on help from that nation state.

Elementary, no?

For such large scale enterprises - you need the coherent help of a nation state. There's no way around it.

Eisenhower would have thought that a trivially simple point - but he lived in a much more responsible political world than the current one. Could anyone who wanted to get a solution implemented trust the United States government?

Putting the matter gently - I wonder.

Every single physically possible large scale solution to economic problems - mine or anybody elses' - will have such problems.

rshow55 - 07:12pm May 30, 2003 EST (# 12228 of 12253)
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.

But if those problems are handled - which ought to be straighforward - - the big, agonizing problems that stand in the way of a better world - energy constraints - nutrition - global warming - availability of water - - could be solved in short order.

Professor Krugman, in association with one or two MIT folks, could run enough grad students to show the technical solutions that would permit the doubling or trebling of world economic growth rates in short order - and some other academics could, too.

The economic data on what matters is all around - and deep. The big problems are relatively few.

The technical problems - for the biggest issues -aren't that hard.

And the political problems wouldn't be, either - if the world now had the coherent organizations that Truman and Eisenhower took for granted.

The "old Europe" - might, in fact, be "old" enough to have institutions that would do. But it would take honest arithmetic.

In fact - it takes words, pictures, and math together.

rshow55 - 07:51pm May 30, 2003 EST (# 12229 of 12253)
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.

U.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed By REUTERS Filed at 7:19 p.m. ET http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-intelligence.html

"Anger among security professionals appears widespread. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that says it is made up mostly of CIA intelligence analysts, wrote to U.S. President George Bush May 1 to hit what they called ``a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions.''

``In intelligence there is one unpardonable sin -- cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy,'' it wrote. ``There is ample indication this has been done with respect to Iraq.''

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