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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 - 02:14pm Dec 31, 2002 EST (# 7168 of 7176)
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.

I've had this available for a long while (click "rshow55") but I'd like to repeat it now. It is a big insight, that was new to me - that permitted me to gel a lot of ideas - and get a much better sense of Plato's problem. It accounted for a lost factor of millions to billions in some of my calculations - something I'd been looking for, and not finding, for some while.

Here are facts and relations that I believe are MUCH underappreciated:

If you're looking at random combinations, and only one possibility is right, the search is BIG. For complex things - impossibly big, without guesses to take it down to size.

How much does it help to eliminate possibilities (correctly), in the random case?

Let's compare N! , N!/(N/2)! , and N!/(N/5!) for three values of N . . . 10, 20, and 40

10! = 3,628,800 . . . . . . . 5! = 120 . . . . . . . . . . . .2! = 2
20! = 2.433 x 10e18 . . . 10! = 3,628,800 . . . . . 4! = 24
40!= 8.16 x 10e47 . . . . 20! = 2.433 x 10e18 .....12! = 4.79 x 10e8

For N= 10 . . N!/(N/2)! =3.024 x 10e4 . . N!/(N/5)! = 1.814 x 10e6
For N= 20 . . N!/(N/2)! = 6.704 x 10e11 . . N!/(N/5)! = 2.027 x 10e16
For N= 40 . . N!/(N/2)! = 3.358 x 10e29 . . N!/(N/5)! = 1.703 x 10e39

or, looking at reciprocals

2!/10! = 5.513 x 10e-7 . . . . . . . 5!/10! = 3.307 x 10e-5
4!/20! = 4.932 x 10e-17 ....... 10!/20! = 1.492 x 10e-12
12!/40! = 5.871 x 10e-40 . . . . 20!/40! = 2.978 x 10e-30

Suppose one child is trying to read a text, and knows 80% of the words? Suppose another child approaches the same text, and knows 20% of the words? Who has a chance? Many other similar questions can be asked, with similar answers.

Getting the most basic, most frequent facts and relations straight is very important. And if people keep checking against facts - - odds of making progress can be surprisingly good.

All the same, for fundamental reasons, for the most common things, progress is also very hard. The odds are overwhelming that both individuals and cultures have made, and will make, many mistakes - - many of them important and deeply embedded in areas where performance is not good. That's both a challenge and a source of hope.

When we learn basic things, the odds of our successfully solving problems can get much better - and impossible jobs can become possible, and sometimes even easy.

- - -

There are things that I can't do alone, and that lunarchick and I cannot do alone, that I believe would be worth doing.

rshow55 - 04:09pm Dec 31, 2002 EST (# 7169 of 7176)
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.

I'm going more slowly than I wish I could, for a number of reasons. One reason is I'm not as smart as I'd like to be, nor as well informed. Another is that I'm only as brave as I am. Another is that I've been working to get conversations into zones where real significant sequences could converge stably - and I have to hesitate, for tactical reasons, to "show all my cards" under circumstances where no one will debrief me face to face - where I can have some chance of checking for sign errors.

These are limitations.

But there is a reason that I don't regard as a limitation.

That reason is that things seem to me to be going very well - and about as fast as they safely can.

I think there's a fine chance that, if things keep going - we can cut the incidence of death and agony from war way down from where it has been. I like the pace of convergence, about where it is.

I think that efforts to get everybody to closure very much faster are dangerous. People have a long way to go, before negotiation can be as comfortable as we'd all like it to be. The North Koreans, the Americans, and other nations have said what they have said, and done what they've done.

We have to proceed in ways that can and will converge, step by step. For the life of me, just now, I can't see why it isn't possible if people just keep at it - and stay as sane and responsible as they've been lately. Nobody has to be a saint. Which is just as well.

Maybe I'm misled by my "relentless optimism" - but it is how it looks to me.

lunarchick - 06:32pm Dec 31, 2002 EST (# 7170 of 7176)

Optimism is a universal human trait ...
Perhaps there's optimism throughout Korea -

Bush feels a deal could be done here.

Harder to do a deal with Iraq?
For what reasons?

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