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.

lchic - 03:03am Jan 20, 2003 EST (# 7822 of 7832)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

The people seem to have been 'genetically modified' of late!

lchic - 03:10am Jan 20, 2003 EST (# 7823 of 7832)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Powell : " The point was approaching, he said, when "it doesn't make any difference how long the inspection goes on, because they're not going to get to the truth because Saddam Hussein does not want them to get to the truth." "

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/20/international/middleeast/20DIPL.html

rshow55 - 05:54am Jan 20, 2003 EST (# 7824 of 7832)
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.

Sometimes, for inescapalbe reasons, the truth is not reconstructable. For excellent, workaday reasons. If you try to check what happened in a human interaction, in the kind of detail that an orthinologist would want to describe about a bird mating event - there are very, very very few cases that are reconstructable without a lot of assumptions.

People hide things - people tailor recounts of events to their own interests - people only remember things that they are physically able to remember - and there is a great deal of unconscious activy in human groups of all kinds.

I have no idea whether the dream sequence in 7818, <a href="/webin/WebX?14@93.BagXa3A71yx^0@.f28e622/9343">rshow55 1/19/03 4:00pm</a> happened - - if it did - the mothers sorting it out immediately afterwards would have been unclear on so much that praise, blame, and assessments of seriousness would have varied drastically between different mothers, and children, with different viewpoints and interests. Fifty years later - any trace of what happened is likely to be repressed - and what is repressed may have but little resemblance to whatever (if anything) corresponded to the events.

We can know enough to do the things we actually do - often and easily - and can do enough better to much reduce the incidence of death and injury from war, poverty, disease, and other things.

The following are all good, difficult questions:

What matters? How exactly? And what can we know well enough to act on?

Especially if we can agree that no human being has a right to trust his or her own interpretation of "divine guidance" very far.

(8 following messages)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense