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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 - 02:26pm Nov 25, 2002 EST (# 6287 of 6294)
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.

rshowalter - 03:41pm Sep 17, 2001 EST (#9301

"In computer simulation studies, Dr. Smuts and her colleagues modeled two types of group-living agents that would behave like herbivores: one that would selfishly consume all the food in a given patch before moving on, and another that would consume resources modestly rather than greedily, thus allowing local plant food to regenerate.

"Researchers had assumed that cooperators could collaborate with genetically unrelated cooperators only if they had the cognitive capacity to know goodness when they saw it.

"But the data suggested otherwise. "These models showed that under a wide range of simulated environmental conditions you could get selection for prudent, cooperative behavior," Dr. Smuts said, even in the absence of cognition or kinship. "If you happened by chance to get good guys together, they remained together because they created a mutually beneficial environment."

"This sort of win-win principle, she said, could explain all sorts of symbiotic arrangements, even among different species — like the tendency of baboons and impalas to associate together because they use each other's warning calls.

"Add to this basic mechanistic selection for cooperation the human capacity to recognize and reward behaviors that strengthen the group — the tribe, the state, the church, the platoon — and selflessness thrives and multiplies. So, too, does the need for group identity. Classic so-called minimal group experiments have shown that when people are gathered together and assigned membership in arbitrary groups, called, say, the Greens and the Reds, before long the members begin expressing amity for their fellow Greens or Reds and animosity toward those of the wrong "color."

""Ancestral life frequently consisted of intergroup conflict," Dr. Wilson of SUNY said. "It's part of our mental heritage."

"Yet he does not see conflict as inevitable. "It's been shown pretty well that where people place the boundary between us and them is extremely flexible and strategic," he said. "It's possible to widen the moral circle, and I'm optimistic enough to believe it can be done on a worldwide scale."

"Ultimately, though, scientists acknowledge that the evolutionary framework for self-sacrificing acts is overlaid by individual choice. And it is there, when individual firefighters or office workers or airplane passengers choose the altruistic path that science gives way to wonder.

"Dr. James J. Moore, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Diego, said he had studied many species, including many different primates. "We're the nicest species I know," he said. "To see those guys risking their lives, climbing over rubble on the chance of finding one person alive, well, you wouldn't find baboons doing that." The horrors of last week notwithstanding, he said, "the overall picture to come out about human nature is wonderful."

""For every 50 people making bomb threats now to mosques," he said, "there are 500,000 people around the world behaving just the way we hoped they would, with empathy and expressions of grief. We are amazingly civilized."

"True, death-defying acts of heroism may be the province of the few. For the rest of us, simple humanity will do."

. . . . . http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/18/health/psychology/18ALTR.html

rshow55 - 02:27pm Nov 25, 2002 EST (# 6288 of 6294)
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.

rshowalter - 03:47pm Sep 17, 2001 EST (#9302

We're having problems where "simple humanity" isn't simple. We're finding situations where people are showing profound barbarism.

How, as a matter of mechanics, can it be

" possible to widen the moral circle" . . to shift "the boundary between us and them" in workable ways that permit more "win-win" situations, and less horror?

. How can "widening the moral circle" be done, consistently enough, predictably enough, on the personal levels where it has to happen, so that the widening works on a worldwide scale?

When Natalie Angier says that this is "all that matters today" she's on to something vital.

She's probably right, at many levels, that

" simple humanity will do."

But we have to know what "simple humanity" takes, under circumstances of complication and conflict, when we now see horrors occuring, with wrenching but monotonous regularity.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense