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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 - 06:02pm Sep 27, 2003 EST (# 14058 of 14061)
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.

13999 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.7z18b6MbJao.2286288@.f28e622/15705 cites

Dogged Engineer's Effort to Assess Shuttle Damage By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN SCHWARTZ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/national/nationalspecial/26ENGI.html , which was the subject of a fine editorial today.

Chicken Littles and Ostriches at NASA http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/opinion/27SAT3.html

Rodney Rocha, an obscure engineer at NASA, tried repeatedly, and in vain, to warn shuttle managers of a potential catastrophe.

We're "wired up" so that, unless we learn some things - we'll continue to make lethal mistakes with monotonous regularity - and the world will remain much uglier than it would be if we could only learn how we go wrong - by "being nice" in the wrong place - when right answers are needed.

12910-11 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.7z18b6MbJao.2286288@.f28e622/14586 . . . http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.7z18b6MbJao.2286288@.f28e622/14587

14000 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.7z18b6MbJao.2286288@.f28e622/15706 asks how many people actually know how to agree to disagree clearly, without fighting, comfortably, so that they can cooperate stably, safely, and productively.

That is surely an obvious question - and I'm not the first to answer them, by any means.

On this thread work to answer those questions has gone on with new tools - using the internet in a very crossreferenced way - and a large interlocking corpus ( with much internal reference - and much connection to "the world outside" ) has been formed. http://www.mrshowalter.net/Sequential.htm I think an unusually large corpus - with some unusually good postings in it - even if you discard every one of mine.

In 14000 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.7z18b6MbJao.2286288@.f28e622/15706 I said something that seems to me to be "obvious" but nonetheless important.

When fights happen - I'm not a bit sure that people are all that clear, specifically, about why they are fighting.

Here's something else obvious .

People know very well how to convert disagreements into escalatory fights.

Cantabb is a master of that.

I admire the work set out in http://www.mrshowalter.net/Similitude_ForceRatios_sjk.htm - not because it is original but because it organizes ideas that are important in themselves in a useful way.

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