New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 10:37am Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4367 of 4370)
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.

Whether you're religious, or not religious -- whether you're "high flown" or "down-to-earth" -- whether you're Christian, or Jewish, or Islamic - the existence of emergent properties is a fact , not a miracle. The circumstances where emergent properties happen are all around us - and the patterns that occur, again and again, can be checked. They aren't miraculous. Some are involved with some mathematical issues that been problems for 350 years. 1566 rshow55 4/20/02 4:07pm

Even at some very simple levels - when things combine in space and time -- new effects can occur as a result of the combination.

Whether math I've done happens to be right or not - - we know that there are emergent properties.

For example, the idea that people are born "blank slates" - that we're somehow magical beings - not special animals - is nonsense , no matter how many people believe it - and that can be checked against evidence. Checking that doesn't rule out religion. But it does rule out the idea that the hand of God has to be involved with every idea that comes into our heads. And it does rule out the idea that we are, all of us, all the time, somehow "divinely inspired" -- an idea which was an everyday idea in Western medieval times - - and an idea that is still very important in the Islamic countries today.

Knowledge of basics about human function does not have to reduce our humanity. But it does say some basic things about our fallibility - our need to check - and the fact that, if we check, we can, quite often, get very good answers, and agree on them.

Sometimes there have to be fights (at least on some level.) But with more understanding - unnecessary fights and horrors can be avoided.

Friedman's piece today http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/18/opinion/18FRIE.html includes this:

These (islamic) undeterrables are young men who are full of rage, because they are raised with a view of Islam as the most perfect form of monotheism, but they look around their home countries and see widespread poverty, ignorance and repression. And they are humiliated by it, humiliated by the contrast with the West and how it makes them feel, and it is this humiliation — this poverty of dignity — that drives them to suicidal revenge. The quest for dignity is a powerful force in human relations.

Closing that dignity gap is a decades-long project. We can help, but it can succeed only if people there have the will.

Maybe it needn't take so long, or be particularly brutal - if we could communicate better - and knew some key, checkable things ourselves - - so that we knew how to explain some key things.

People crazed enough to fly airplanes into buildings have a moral problem - but problems of understanding and information, too.

If we as a culture knew these key things - we could also teach our children, much more effectively, how to read. And teach them more about what it means to be a human being -- in ways that most decent clergymen, of all faiths, could accept and embrace - given just a little moral courage.

These are problems that interest many people -- they've interested the Science staff of The New York Times , in a focused, professional way -- for years now.

bbbuck - 11:02am Sep 18, 2002 EST (# 4368 of 4370)
Trivia Question What was Sonia Darrin referring to when she asked ..'What do those look like, grapefruit?'

To wrcooper, and anyone other than lchic and rshow55.

1. Well I don't know anything about missile defense.
2. Since I've been 'visiting' here I have never seen a post on missile defense.
3. I periodically 'taunt' lchic and rshow55 because they are easy targets.
4. lchic is an above average taunter.
5. Hope you can get the forum back on topic, I will support your effort.
6. rshowalter is laughed at over the guardian, uk, and I have signed up over there and they have a very good and lively forum with ofcourse many posters being from europe. Check them out. Quite a different layout from here(nytimes) but very good and interesting once you see how they've set it up.

(2 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense