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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 - 12:59pm Sep 4, 2003 EST (# 13496 of 13513)
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.

Gisterme's 7334 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@93.uTWNaX74ZAm^1889463@.f28e622/8861 is a very important post.

One person's aesthetic sense of order, symmetry and harmony, can and has led to the ugliest sort of disrder, assymetry, discord and death for millions of others.

Stalin... Hitler... Hirohito... Chariman Mao... Pol Pot... Saddam Hussein...

See the point?

- - -

"The point" is very much involved with human lasing - which can work for good or for bad.

The questions

How does "human lasing work?"

and

What is ready to lase?

and

What should lase?

are different questions.

- - -

Here is a solution ready to lase ( or nearly ready ) - but not fed into an apparatus that can produce human lasing:

It is a problem that requires some collective decisions. Everything Eisenhower wanted me to do - the "Robert Showalter" problems - were like that. He wanted "good decisions, ready to lase" - for a leader (or a group) to evaluate and choose to implement or not.

The technical jobs weren't insurmountable (for example, the optimal design jobs done at AEA were straightforward) but every one of them required, and continues to require - some help from a nation state http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232007@.f28e622/14942 . Nation states - large teams (any functional teams) have to control the "human lasing" that occurs in them - when it matters enough.

I think getting this solar energy project done would be worth more to the US national security than anything that can possibly happen in Iraq.

13039 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232007@.f28e622/14716

13040 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232007@.f28e622/14717

13041 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232007@.f28e622/14718

13042 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.sqGab9kQDyO.7232007@.f28e622/14719

But the work is "almost ready to lase" - and the process of generating and perfecting such solutions - and checking them - is different from the process of "human lasing" and has to be.

We have to be able to have coordinated large scale human responses that work decently in human terms - and avoid the horrors that people like Stalin... Hitler... Hirohito... Chariman Mao... Pol Pot... Saddam Hussein . . can and have produced in the past.

If we understand more about the mechanism of "human lasing" - which is essential for so much we do as sociotechnical animals - we can get more done, much more safely - and do a much better job of stopping "human lasing" of horror.

Pardon me for working slowly - when I saw Gisterme's last posting - I wanted to be especially careful. He's thinking about some important things.

GWB had a wonderful experience - and I bet he did it because his father told him to. He was a cheerleader. The cheerleader virtues are essential in politics.

But there are two parts to Davy Crockett's saying.

Be sure you're right. Then go ahead.

Cheerleading is vital for going ahead effectively. But it is also important to be right.

I was assigned to work on the "getting it right" part - and I'm sorry I'm moving more slowly than gisterme sometimes likes - but I'm trying to "get back to him" with things that a leader of the United States could use.

rshow55 - 01:03pm Sep 4, 2003 EST (# 13497 of 13513)
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.

Will, I very much appreciate your last post. I was touched by it.

Call me crazy, but it seems to me that to just "be an engineer" in the sense you suggest - and do it successfully - would "take a miracle" - though miracles like that often do happen.

A lot of people and organizations are set up to make very sure that such miracles don't happen to easily, until people with certain kinds of team legitimacy give the word. That's necessary, and I'm trying to get to where I can merit that word.

rshow55 - 01:08pm Sep 4, 2003 EST (# 13498 of 13513)
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.

Gisterme mentioned Emperor Hirohito in his list of monsters - and there are good reasons he did. Still, it is interesting to note how Douglas MacArthur handled Hirohito during the reconstruction of Japan.

Not that I always believe MacArthur - in the most literal sense.

But he does say some amusing things. This one "changes shape before my eyes":

"Whatever faults may be inherent in the military character, evasive misreprentation has never been one of them."

That's not the whole story - as Eisenhower explained it to me. - - I'll try to fit in the story of MacArthur and Hirohito later. But sometimes "justice" and "practicality" take some looking at.

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