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 - 08:41pm Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7201 of 7204)
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.

From 7188 rshow55 1/1/03 5:37pm :

"I believe that whether of not God exists, we are animals, and only as bright as we are. I believe that, doing our best, our understanding, as an animal reality, is virtual - - though often correct.

"Most people don't really believe this - or aren't comfortable with it, or haven't worked out the contradictions involved here. How can our understanding possibly be virtual, a construction of our own minds - and agree so often with that of others? How can the world possibly be as magical as it seems without a great deal of magic, all around? Can these ideas and understanding evolve - without magic? Is it possible to imagine that we are really animals - and have that seem right, and feel right?

"There are logical problems here. They are very practical. People have been worried about them since Plato's time - for good reasons - and these logical problems are important to our ability to negotiate comfortable, stable, peaceful, just relations.

The logical problems involved in the evolution of ideas are formally identical to the logical problems involved in the evolution of the species - an issue that deeply divides the United States population, and effects both elections and the selection of textbooks.

The Smithsonian Library publishes some beautiful books - good as popular presentation, and intellectually first rate, too. One I like was written a while ago, in 1968:

THE EVIDENCE OF EVOLUTION by Nicholas Hotton III

The book might, with very few changes in evidence and logic, be titled "Evidence for A Designing God, Who Only Pays Limited Attention."

The dustcover starts:

"There are well over a million different species of plants and animals in the world, and one of the greatest mysteries still being unravelled by science is how this fantastic variety came to be."

rshow55 - 08:42pm Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7202 of 7204)
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.

Hotton's book starts with this:

OF TIME AND CHANGE

"The entire history of man, it has been said, could be summed up in one single phrase: "When do we eat?" But to limit such an insight to the carreer of one two-legged organism, however high our opinion of him may be, seems shortsighted. For the history of all life on earth could as well be seen as one continuous and arduous quest for sustaining energy, and it has been princiapply as a means of succeeding in that quest that life, over billions of years, has "evolved" from a microscopic bit of sea-borne jelly to more than 1.25 million different species ranging from asters to zebras, including you and me.

"For all life is a continuum: all living things, despite their awesome diversity, are related to each other. And evolution is the term we give to that process by which the structure of plants and animals changes with the passage of time, thus accounting for the continuum.

"Modern evolutionary theory was first set forth in detail by an English naturalist named Charles Robert Darwin a little more than one hundred years ago. Since then evolutionary thought has played a prominant, and frequently controversial role in changing man's view of his universe from a static one, in which he is the apex of nature, to one that is dynamic, in which he occupies a small and undoubtedly transient place. The idea, of course, runs counter to a great many deep-seated anthropocentric notions, today perhaps no less than in Darwin's time, as we witness ever more demonstrations of man's mastery over nature. Man, it would seem, is unique.

"Be that as it may, man is still the only scientist of whom we have evidence. And whether or not the objective universe has meaning in the traditional sense, man is the only entity who can trouble himself over such matters, and this at least chains him to a unique pinnacle on life's unfinished mountain.

Modern science relies on systems of logic and rigorous procedures of reasoning first developed by the Greeks and later revived during the Middle Ages. Unlike the Greeks, who considered external evidence of secondary importance to systems of thinking, the medieval thinkers concluded that external evidence provides the only valid grounds for the formulation of theory. And this new approach, which is still the heart of science, very soon led to important conclusions about the geologic history of the earth and the origin of life."

(2 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense