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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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lchic - 08:53am Oct 21, 2003 EST (# 15332 of 15346)
ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong foundation

Truth - does technology transform thinking - does truth 'change'?

http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/111/index.html

http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/creativitythinking/111/111transcript.html

ROBERT: Let's broadly look at how technology affects thinking, because some say that it's nothing less than a shift in worldview. George [Kozmetsky] was talking about how something that used to take an hour now takes fifteen minutes. What does that do to the way we make decisions, the way we reflect or meditate?

MARVIN: Again, I have mixed feeling about questions like that, because I think we still think in pretty much the same way. Our brains haven't been changed, but the tools that we have are immensely better. If somebody asks me a question of fact, I can usually either fail or succeed in finding the answer from the Web pretty fast. As for computing, we can solve problems numerically and analytically--

ROBERT: Aren't there pressures to be less reflective and make decisions faster, because facts are coming at us faster and are more readily at our disposal, and people expect faster answers?

MARVIN: Well, there are a lot of problems like that. Sometimes we're under pressure to decide faster; sometimes, with the great leverage of technology, a decision can affect more people and in a shorter time. One of the most dangerous things is the rapid communication in political affairs: you might have a TV network asking, "What does the public think?" and five minutes later they'll say that seventy percent of the American people think such-and-such, and so forth.

ROBERT: And maybe it was thirty percent just two days earlier.

MARVIN: That's right. And if you wait a week, maybe it'll settle down. But very few of these media people are aware that such sampling is unstable and very dangerous--opinions can spread like an epidemic. The general populace seems to think that if a lot of people believe something, then they should, too. It's called a flip-flop, and in computers it leads to the destruction of information rather than the increasing of it.

lchic - 09:01am Oct 21, 2003 EST (# 15333 of 15346)
ultimately TRUTH outs : TRUTH has to be morally forcing : build on TRUTH it's a strong foundation

&

ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT

FEW people get what's really going on here. The change in mental process is nothing less than a shift in worldview. Technology is radically transforming our thinking in at least three new ways: