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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 13, 2003 EST (# 13637 of 13638)
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.

13625 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.AFAgbGhiFsF.8906494@.f28e622/15318 includes this:

Human actions work best according to the following pattern:

" Get scared .... take a good look ..... get organized ..... fix it .... recount so all concerned are "reading from the same page ...... go on to other things."

People ought to be scared by now - scared enough to do some looking. How, as a matter of mechanics and logic is is possible for people to "take a good look" and "get organized" and get so that they are "reading off the same page" . .? Lchic and I have tried to deal with these questions - and make headway.

An essential fact is that we have to come to agree about what cheating is in the detailed context we're in. What cheating is to the people involved -as they are - where they are. As of now - that issue is not thought about clearly enough for stable end games to be possible.

People aren't nearly as clear on this as they ought to be about this. Here is an area, strange as it seems, where people lack empathy - and need to develop some.

The Urge to Punish Cheats: Not Just Human, but Selfless By NATALIE ANGIER January 22, 2002 http://www.mrshowalter.net/UrgeToPunishCheatsNotJustHumanButSelfless.htm contains this:

In the ferocity of the public outcry, and the demand from even those with no personal stake in the Enron collapse that "justice" be done, some scientists see a vivid example of humanity's evolved and deep-seated hatred of the Cheat. The Cheat is the transgressor of fair play, the violator of accepted norms, the sneak . . . .

Human beings are elaborately, ineluctably social creatures, scientists say, and are more willing than any other species to work for the common good — to cooperate with nonkin and to help out strangers, sometimes at great cost to oneself, as the death of hundreds of rescue workers at the World Trade Center only too sadly showed. Such a readiness to trust others, to behave civilly in a crowd, to share and empathize, to play the occasional Samaritan — all the behaviors that we laud and endorse and vow to cultivate more fully in ourselves — could not have evolved without a corresponding readiness to catch, and to punish, the Cheat.

Only recently have researchers realized that a willingness, even eagerness, to punish transgressors of the social compact is at least as important to the maintenance of social harmony as are regular displays of common human decency. . . . .

In an article titled " Altruistic Punishment in Humans ," which appears in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Nature , Dr. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and Dr. Simon Gachter of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland offer evidence that people will seek to punish a cheat even when the punishment is costly to them and offers no material benefit — the very definition of altruism. The researchers propose that the threat of such punishment may have been crucial to the evolution of human civilization and all its concomitant achievements.

"It's a very important force for establishing large-scale cooperation," Dr. Fehr said in a telephone interview. "Every citizen is a little policeman in a sense. There are so many social norms that we follow almost unconsciously, and they are enforced by the moral outrage we expect if we were to violate them."

That "little policeman" is necessary - but the way that little and unconscious "policeman" works has to be better understood - especially where questions of how is the world to be policed are central from many, many perspectives.

I often post on Guardian Talk fora 9390 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.AFAgbGhiFsF.8906494@.f28e622/10929 - and Jorian319 seems to feel that is dishonor

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