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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 - 02:37pm Aug 22, 2002 EST (# 3897 of 3904)

from May 24th 2001, continued

"A SEA of hope, and of the beginning of solid hope.

"As vast, in its way, as the "possible" but unrealized "human potential" in an ejaculation of sperm.

"And sometimes, not so very seldom, after plowing through a vast pampas of second rate ideas, or ideas now set aside, you find something sharp and beautiful, that works - something that bore fruit.

"I found the process of invention and focusing fascinating, and also came to think that the processes in my mind (not very different from the processes in the minds of patent lawyers and searchers around me) fit , and fit very well, with the patterns of a patent application -- which still seems to me to be a highly evolved database form, adapted for near-optimal pictorial and logical processing by human beings -- with absolutely everything extraneous stripped away.

"Just like, in another way, there's more stuff than a person can read, or think about, or hold in your head --- in the discourse on the Guardian Talk -- so many words, and so many of them fine ones. Language, I came to feel, like a lot of other people, was a fascinating code.

"Also, by the way, then and later, got a really strong, sharp, confident sense of what mathematicians and engineers couldn't do with the math tools available. Just because I liked that sort of thing, I got interested in that.

"Anyway, nothing so far is high-flown stuff -- just about anybody would have had similar ideas, or would have in pretty short order, if they did similar things.

". . . . . Got interested in my own inadequacies as a communicator - - they were all the usual inadequacies -- for all the same reasons anybody else would.

rshow55 - 02:38pm Aug 22, 2002 EST (# 3898 of 3904)

from May 24th 2001, continued

"Got really interested in what a disaster applied math was from a practical point of view.

"And how everybody lies about it -- and how scared everybody is about it - and how muddled.

A person using applied math to figure something new out goes along a little while, doing the stuff everybody else can do -- and, seems like, the minute you get to something nobody else has done before - if it is stuff that takes math to get through -- well, almost always, the math stops you. (This isn't quite like it happened -- there's some condensation here -- but anyway, I got the idea that every time a person had to model coupled circumstances, it went bad -- and felt that a whole bunch of things could get done - if only people could actually do some math - math that went wrong, the same way, with monotonous regularity .)

"I got the idea (along with some other people) that people, in a lot of fields, had gone as far as their math could carry them, and felt that if they could only solve what looked like ONE kind of problem --- a whole lot of stuff might just open up. Really wasn't much clearer about it than that. But I felt that I was "falling off the edge of the earth" on design problems in the same kind of way, again and again, and other people were, too.

"Anyway, I was an impressionable, ambitious, big kid at the time, and I got hooked.

"There were also some applications that looked militarily important --- the idea seemed sensible that, if people could find a way to do differential equations as well as birds and bats somehow do them, air to air missiles would hardly ever miss -- and that would make a difference -- especially if the countries on one side of the iron curtian got the answer, and the other side didn't have it. Suddenly, the idea was, that the slow side would be effectively without an air force. Got interested in that. Encouraged to look at that.

. . . . . .

"Got real interested in questions around how to avoid that -- especially after learning some things about the Cold War, as it was actually being conducted. Things looked explosive, unstable to me. "

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