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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 - 08:20am Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7177 of 17697)
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 think this is a year where some lessons are going to have to be learned about stability and function of international systems, in terms of basic requirements of order , symmetry , and harmony - at the levels that make sense - and learned clearly and explicitly enough to produce systems that have these properties by design, not by chance.

The lessons are fairly easy, I believe, though not difficult to screw up. A problem is that perfect stability - and complete instability - are mirror images - and issues of balance and correct signs can be, in a plain sense, matters of life and death. And cost. For individuals, and whole systems.

Outfoxed by North Korea By LEON FUERTH http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/01/opinion/01FUER.html

"In view of the alternatives, it would be wise for the Bush administration to reverse course and engage North Korea in negotiations."

There is some motion in that direction. I think that the administration is working hard, and becoming sensitive and sophisticated about a number of things - and this is a very hopeful time.

With a large potential for (relatively small) disasters. The world as a whole isn't going to blow up really soon, for forseeable reasons - as it easily could have at a time when US - Russian communication was much less than it is today. But some millions of avoidable deaths - and ugly reverberations - could easily happen - and happen soon.

I think all these disasters could be avoided, and that good things are in motion that could and should avoid the bad, and bring in much safer, more prosperous, humanly more flexible times.

To do it, it seems to me this is the year where some lessons are going to have to be learned about stability and function of international systems, in terms of basic requirements of order , symmetry , and harmony . In the ways, and at the levels, that can work for the people and organizations involved. Lessons will have to be learned clearly and explicitly enough so that such systems can be developed - partly by evolution - but with a lot of specific design and crosschecking, as well. People always have to muddle through - but the muddling has to be better informed, about key issues of stability and function - or we're in trouble.

Maybe things are neither as hopeful nor as dangerous as I think. But that's how it looks to me.

I sent a postcard to a leader in November 2001, and I wish some of the specific, personal requests - that don't seem to me to involve much money or inconvenience, would be reconsidered. But maybe I'm wrong asking to talk to someone capable and connected face to face.

I am sure that some patterns of communication need to be improved - so that people can "connect the dots" better than they now do. Collecting the dots better, in ways people can more easily use. Finding ways to make the evidence more ordered, symmetric, and harmonious so that it can be used to find "good solutions." Sometimes organized in several ways.

Just now, I'm really hopeful.

lunarchick - 09:27am Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7178 of 17697)

If the 'future' can be seen to be fine .... what went wrong with the present?

rshow55 - 10:35am Jan 1, 2003 EST (# 7179 of 17697)
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.

That's a devastingly good question - and I'll think about it while I'm cooking pancakes, and having breakfast.

Before I go, there's one thing that I've found particularly ugly, and boring at some levels, but fascinating in others. People overdo "perfect" solutions. Which become astonishingly (if not perfectly) awful. People get orders and priorities wrong. Sometimes priorities are so wrong that important considerations are even omitted.

And there are a lot of biases that are stereotypical.

At the level of order, symmetry, and harmony - political persuasions also have certain patterns, it seems to me, that go wrong in stereotypical ways.

Conservatives are for order, sometimes to the exclusion of all other considerations - sometimes with too little attention to symmetry and harmony.

Intellectuals, often, are for symmetry - applied to their own arbitrary, capricious, and very diverse senses of order and harmony.

People of the left - of various persuasions, are for harmony - often harmony at all costs - often with no sense at all about necessities for order and symmetry in systems that can possibly work.

You need order, symmetry, and harmony together - - in complex systems they depend on each other - and again and again and again and again there has to be matching - and a question of what works, in the situation as it is.

And here's a pet peeve of mine. People set up exception handling to work well once - in ways that set it up backwards on the first use - so that a lot of systems, at all levels, that people think are set up right, are dead wrong - scattering sign errors all through the logical system. In nuke controls, and some other spots, that one scares me particularly - especially after I found another propogating error in those systems, a while back.

Anyway - - I'm having breakfast. I'll be back. I'm sorry I didn't post a summary yesterday that I hoped to -- I got diverted. Pardon me.

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