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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 - 11:16am Aug 25, 2003 EST (# 13379 of 13380)
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 Almarst's posts are important.

Call Me Ishmael, for $3,250 By WARREN ST. JOHN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/24/fashion/24RETR.html

You can "call me Ishmael" too - though I've got more than $3,250 at stake. http://www.mrshowalter.net/CaseyRel.html Both in terms of money, and my understanding of the stakes, personally, for the United States - and for the world.

We're in a time of crisis - where it is vital that some things that people have been stumped about get worked out. And they can be.

13320 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.Cz7EbOIjBa9.5411349@.f28e622/15010 includes this:

"People need to be able to put words , pictures , and math - the language of quantity together better than they now know how to do - so that they can understand, predict, and control things they need to better than they do now. In part, that's a matter of mechanics.

"And a matter of being clear about what we now do well - and where we are stumped.

"Eisenhower worried about things like that. So did Casey. I don't know about other people, but I think if they were alive today, they'd be interested and pleased with what lchic and I have put together. Together.

And with an enormous amount of discourse with able interesting posters - including Gisterme , Almarst , and fredmoore .

. . . .

On my credentials - at a time when I hadn't set out a key part of the story - my relationship with Eisenhower. 8240-41 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.Cz7EbOIjBa9.5411349@.f28e622/9946

Though that part of the story may have been obvious, at that, given what people knew (some of it carefully checked, I'd judge) about my time at Cornell. Lchic thought that setting out the Eisenhower part of the story was a useful kind of "wrap" - organizing much of the rest.

Wrapping our future in betterment . . dR3 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee9cff9/2379

I've been keeping my promises. And this thread has clarified some things about description - though human beings have been perceptive about description through the ages.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/a_md8000s/md8211.htm starts with this, from

Envisioning Information by Eward R. Tufte, p. 50

" We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pidgeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the sheep from the goats."

"Since so many ways of seeing and connecting to information are possible, how are people to agree?

"Especially when people have different basic beliefs, different interests, and come from different backgrounds and assumptions, both intellectual and emotional?

"At one level, people will NEVER agree about everything on any complex subject such as missile defense, and it would be both unrealistic and inhuman to ask them to, or force them to.

"At the same time, different people, with different views, have to cooperate in ways that fit human and practical realities, and it often works.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense