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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 - 08:39am Sep 9, 2003 EST (# 13575 of 13576)
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 was commandeered by Eisenhower in October 1967 - and at our first meeting General Eisenhower had me read from C.P. Snow's Science and Government - which has a passage I can't put my finger on just now about two basic lessons P.M.S. Blackett taught military people and scientists during WWII and later - "one to each."

Both are lessons that people "already know" - but don't always know well enough.

The lesson to the military was that you cannot fight wars on gusts of emotion.

The lesson to the scientists was that if are giving advice, you have to convince yourself that you yourself would act so, if you were responsible for action.

I'm subject to serious criticism on the second point - and have had sense enough to be uneasy about it - though not sense enough to have remained silent. I've thought that, though "the best I have" might not be "ready for prime time" - it was good enough to post on this thread.

People can only do things that are possible and that they think are possible. Careful, responsible people have to know why something is possible before having much hope that the thing can succeed.

I worked hard on a "dry run" briefing intended for Vladimir Putin in March 2001, and I still think it had a lot of good stuff in it. http://www.mrshowalter.net/PutinBriefing.html

But http://www.mrshowalter.net/PutinBriefing.html is seriously incomplete - in ways a similar attempt at a "briefing" wouldn't have to be today. The briefing makes suggestions that seem far, far, far too complicated to hope to handle successfully. It was written before the notion of "connecting the dots" was focused on this board - and "connecting the dots" describes compactly a kind of "miracle" that permits people to do as well as they do in our complicated world. And that discussion, which began with publication of Erica Goode's Finding Answers In Secret Plots http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/weekinreview/10GOOD.html was clear, right from the beginning - about the fact that "connections of the dots" can be terribly wrong. That same point was discussed from a statistical angel by The Odds of That by Lisa Belkin http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/magazine/11COINCIDENCE.html

But inferences from "connections of the dots" are often right. Somehow people figure out for themselves almost everything they know - and the process - which seemed a mystery to Plato - is a key question to this day.

The questions

" how do people figure things out?

and

" how does the process fail or mislead?

have been central questions in philosophy for 2500 years - and we can make progress here. Not on the broadest part of the question of how human reasoning works - but on a related question.

"What are the odds that we can figure things out in more orderly, more useful ways?"

( I'm quoting here from a post of mine that has a rare characteristic - bbuck liked it. http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.wxECbZdJEuv.8043183@.f28e622/4913 )

The odds are much better than I used to think - and this was a question that I did think about. For more than twenty years - I tried to work out problems where I looked at neural logic from a cryptological perspective - something I'd been asked to do. ( Something, I believe, that Nash was also asked to do, though that's only a guess. ) Monotonously, I kept calculating that people were routinely solving problems that were computationally too hard by factors of millions - billions - huge factors. I was stumped for a long time about the point.

It was a big thing for me - a breakthrough for me - when

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