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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 - 09:41am Jul 7, 2003 EST (# 12877 of 12879)
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.

We need to make a breakthrough. We have to show - so it is effective - that with enough "connecting of the dots" you can get to clarity.

We are, still today, in a world that is too "Orwellian" - but there are openings.

The Road to Oceania By WILLIAM GIBSON http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/25/opinion/25GIBS.html

"Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.

. . .

"That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.

" It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.

" In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

" I say "truths," however, and not "truth," as the other side of information's new ubiquity can look not so much transparent as outright crazy. Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what's going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more readily.

But often - assumptions clarify - or there is common ground (especially on "simple" things, like engineering.) And idea that lchic and I have worked out - and illustrated on NYT and Guardian Talk threads - Disciplined Beauty is key. In the real world, there often are right answers - and people can find them. http://www.mrshowalter.net/DBeauty.html

A central fact is that often - workable "connections of the dots" are sparse - so sparse that in the end, only one "connection of the dots" fits -and that fact is clear. When this happens, the truth can be found, and agreed on - enough for workable agreements.

Good answers are sparse - so sparse that we can usually hope to solve the problems we face, if we're honest, and work at it.

http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.FELAbu6FnEp.743823@.f28e622/4770

http://www.mrshowalter.net/a_new_3000s/3924.htm http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.FELAbu6FnEp.743823@.f28e622/4947

http://www.mrshowalter.net/a_new_3000s/3993.htm http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.FELAbu6FnEp.743823@.f28e622/5

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