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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 - 08:42am Aug 16, 2002 EST (# 3734 of 3741)

I've felt that this thread has been valuable, and I believe that lchic and some others may think so, too. Others may feel differently - on the basis of standards that are widely respected, for good reasons - especially in news organizations.

I believe that this thread has accomplished the following already:

It has demonstrated new ways of getting complex cooperation between staffed organizations using internet resources.

It has provided (or at the least, demonstrated in prototype) a high bandwidth channel of communication between the US and Russia - and clarified differences of view that take a lot of talking to clarify. MD1999 rshow55 5/4/02 10:39am

It has been involved with neutralizing the main threat to world stability from missile defense. The Russians now know that US missile defense efforts, as they stand, do not as a practical matter threaten strategic balances. Before, US "missile defense" efforts were a major barrier to ending some of the worst aspects of the Cold War, because these strategic concerns were important. Now, though the program continues to soak up resources - the biggest objection to it from the perspective of world peace has been neutralized. The waste remains.

This thread has shown new, effective ways of "collecting, connecting and correcting" "the dots" using internet resources.

At the same time, this thread has had some blazing defects. Its most important defects, I believe, are linked to the things that make it hopeful - that raise the possibility that it may be very useful.

A widely used sense of the word "crazy" is "off the norm - and inconvenient to deal with." In some ways, this thread has been crazy in that sense. In other ways, it has been successful - very successful. I think Bill Casey would have thought so. I think that the "average reader of the New York Times" - if she noticed the thread - and thought about it, might think so, too.

Lchic and I have been working to solve problems that have never been solved before -- problems about human communication -- problems about peacemaking -- problems about how to make life safer and better.

We've gone at it in a way that I thought at the beginning was likely to work - and I believe that the thread shows does work.

rshow55 - 08:47am Aug 16, 2002 EST (# 3735 of 3741)

It is possible to "collect, connect, and correct the dots" - - and get sharp, new, useful ideas into focus by discourse.

I think this thread shows a lot about how that can be done, how it is done, and how that human creativity can be made safer, more comfortable, and better.

The thread also shows a lot about how the process can be frustrated.

I'm told that the average person hears or reads 40,000 words a day -- already too many to count or recount. A computer tally of this thread counts about 5 million words - 125 times 40,000 words. One may ask: What on earth could such a word count (along with a hugely larger corpus accessed on this thread by links) possibly do? How can such a mass of words have value - even if a sampling of them usually gets text of high quality?

The fact is that people who solve problems talk a lot about them. And think about them, rehashing "the same material" for extended times. It often works. How? Yet talk and thinking often amounts to nothing. Why?

How does human logic work so well as a "self-organizing system" at the level of language, logic, brain, and social communication? Where does it go wrong - and when can problems be fixed?

It seems to me that this thread has shown something important and new about these things -- enough to have been worthwhile - and that this thread can be a resource in an effort that can show much more - at a cost tiny compared to the benefits to mankind (and to the participants, too.)

One central thing is that it has clarified the connection between the statistical and the symbolic-logical in human thought and action, and can clarify that question some more. This is a technical question - but is also one of the key questions that needs to be answered at the interface between the "two cultures" - the technical culture and the culture of the humanities. It is also as important a question, at the level of dollars and cents, as any I know.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense