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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 - 11:43am Jun 12, 2003 EST (# 12499 of 12502)
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 broken my promises to Eisenhower and others - I promised that I would never, under any circumstances, reveal my relationship with Eisenhower except face to face to a proper authority. The time finally came where it seemed to me that, to keep faith with the things I promised Eisenhower I'd try to do, I had to break that promise. Perhaps I simply ran out of strength.

Living Under the Virtual Volcano of Video Games This Holiday Season by VERLYN KLINKENBORG http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/opinion/16MON4.html had a phrase that very much impressed me - though it can be wrong in an interesting way:

" every human activity, serious or playful, eventually ramifies into a world of its own, a self-contained cosmos of enormous complexity."

Understanding of a specific, clearly defined thing can often proceed in that sort of way. But eventually - with enough crosschecking for internal consistency, and enough matching between "maps" and the "territories" the "maps" are supposed to describe - the complexity can converge, collapse, into something stark and simple, and certain in a specific domain of definition.

Without the crosschecking and matching, simulation can be no better than a game.

If Eisenhower and people around him had known, in 1953 or 1954, what people now know about simulation - if he had at his disposal the level of simulation capacity people now have in their games - I think he could have "solved all the world's problems" in his own terms. And in Khruschev's, too. 6829 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.4QS9bSehe9p.101721@.f28e622/8334

If people used these capacities - and had as much organizational skill and structure as Eisenhower commanded then - we could do a much better job than we are doing of "solving all the world's problems" now.

rshow55 - 11:49am Jun 12, 2003 EST (# 12500 of 12502)
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.

1967-68 was a long time ago. I had perhaps 40-50 hours of verbal contact with Eisenhower (perhaps half face to face) over that time - and a lot more with his subordinates - but it was high stress contact - and my recollections of it are sometimes very clear (about the things he was grilling me to do or teaching me about) but mostly I've forgotten details. I remember what he cared about that he talked about to me - and how tough he was. How concerned he was.

There's been a lot of time and emotion since - and both can blur and distort. But some things can converge, with effort.

There's a problem with long and complex. And another problem with short. . . . . The long and the short of it, I think, is that you need both long and short.

Before a responsible person or group condenses a discourse to the short answers that a leader can use - that many people can remember - those answers better be right. Or right enough. That's often forgotten.

It would be good for the answer offered to be an optimal answer. That is sometimes practically possible.

It was Eisenhower's dream that practical ways could be found to make optimal answers possible much more often. He wasn't alone in having that dream - and in having concerns set out by C.P. Snow.

When problems are set out in physical and logical terms - with assumptions and weights clear - exact and optimal answers exist and can often be found.

That's not enough for action - because such answers don't fit into human minds and organizations without more work.

But it is a necessary start - and when jobs matter enough to do optimally - worth some hard and honest work.

Now, when we face up to things, and are clear - it is work that people can do. We have the tools.

That's new.

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