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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 - 11:33am Jan 10, 2003 EST (# 7560 of 7569)
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.

If you are trying to communicate - a time comes when it is necessary to have both sides in a predictable state - and "heads up" signals work for that. SMALL stereotypical or vestigial threat signals - that are clearly "threats" in an evolutionary sense - are standard parts of interspecies fighting or mating dances. The birds offer some especially clear and vivid examples. At one level - these transition signals are threats -small or large - and at another large - or small.

After these signals, some way or other - the animals involved "make a decision".

Some sequences are stable - some unstable - - and it is important to know which. There are ways, very often - to get VERY good approximate answers.

For example - an entity may either be a particle or a wave - but in a place where, by measurement, it seems unclear one way it can be VERY certain looked at another way. So a shift of procedure, of perspective - can be useful - or even vital. Especially if statistical answers are acceptable - and usually they have to be.

Stability is important - and if something looks very unstable - it helps to know that it is possible to SWITCH to another perspective which, at the same time, for the same circumstances is VERY stable - but it is only safe to make the switch if there is a CORRECT transform between the perspectives. Far and away the safest transforms are canonical in the ways that matter.

Small fights are usually MUCH better for everybody involved than large ones - though large fights can be unavoidable. If they occur it is vital that everybody be VERY clear what the fight was about - and how it was decided - in all the ways that matter for action.

rshow55 - 11:37am Jan 10, 2003 EST (# 7561 of 7569)
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.

If you have many perspectives - and reliable canonical transforms combined with reliable checking procedures - you can do statistics and get very clear on things that are both important and undecidable otherwise.

People have been worried about this sort of thing since Plato's time - for vital reasons. Bill Casey cared about it a lot. He wasn't at all polite about it. He beat it into me that this was my main problem. Though I had other things "on my list" as well. I've been doing the best I can.

rshow55 - 11:51am Jan 10, 2003 EST (# 7562 of 7569)
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.

The ideal of "everybody reading from the same page" is about that.

You can have workable agreement about facts, and relations that matter for interaction between the parties at the same time that there are bitter disagreements about "fundamentals."

Why not?

You can't avoid it and you SHOULDN'T WANT TO.

So long as the things that matter for action are balanced in a livable way that is orderly, symmetrical, and harmonious enough in the ways that matter enough to sort.

Life and death issues matter enough to sort out well - even if leaders have to be a little uncomfortable - and have to do some careful thinking and careful guessing.

George Bush ought to THANK me for teaching him how to handle these things more stably - for the sort term and the long term.

rshow55 - 12:06pm Jan 10, 2003 EST (# 7563 of 7569)
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.

Gisterme and I disagree about a lot - but because of the way we use language - and careful scholarly work by many people over a long time I can be VERY sure that gisterme and I agree on the definitions of something like 50,000 words - each with something like 3 distinct definitions. I have analogous agreements with many, many millions of people.

How do you think that happened?

Divine intervention is one explanation - and if you're consistent enough in your use of that explanation - you can fit evidence.

There are other explanations, too. There are standard patterns of logic that we all share - they are animal - they yeild an enormous amount of agreement between people who are checking the same facts - and we can learn to make peace better than we have.

Whether you happen to believe in God or not.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense