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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 - 02:29pm Aug 22, 2002 EST (# 3894 of 3904)

On May 24th 2001, I wrote this, in response to some very friendly questions, on a Guardian thread, now expired, titled

" does anyone have the faintest idea what rshowalter is going on about??

"I've had a dream -- and it seems to be coming true, in some ways.

"All my life, since I've been a year old, maybe, I've been trying to figure things out, and make myself understood -- just like everybody else.

"That's a dream, for all of us, that somehow comes true, often enough -- always seems like magic, to me -- how IS it that things pop into your head, and how IS it that, if you keep talking about those things, and thinking about those things, they get clearer?

"I really got bit with that question - at a very impressionable age. When I was 14, I invented something (an exercise device, it was, and useful in its way) but it doesn't matter so much what it was -- what really set me off, and changed my life, is I went to the United States Patent Office -- spent nearly a whole summer there -- immersed in human creativity.

"After that, the questions

" how do people invent things? "

and

" how do they figure out things? "

"really took hold of me. Because it is a miracle how creative people can be - and how fast they can put things together -- and learn language, and sort out their world --

rshow55 - 02:31pm Aug 22, 2002 EST (# 3895 of 3904)

from May 24th 2001, continued . .

"anyway, I got interested in how people invent things -- how they get words, pictures, and math to fit together. Fascinating stuff. Never been the same after that.

"Wanted to figure out HOW to be an inventor, well enough to teach it -- wanted to figure out how the brain works in action -- got interested in coupled math problems --

"Never been the same since .... going on for 40 years ago now.

"This was clear -- people DO figure things out.

"And if you "put your mind to" something -- very often you can do it.

"Still seems like a miracle to me.

"Got so I could invent some. Got so I could do some math -- one thing and another.

"Got interested in the notion that it might be possible to break the code of the brain. Various reasons to want to, some people wanted to.

"Anyway, a part of that is trying to figure out how, someway or other, people sort out things so they get patterns in their heads. I met a lady, Dawn Riley, on the NYT threads, and she just had to be the most creative intellectual poet-artist I'd ever seen, and we got to working on a kind of code-breaking - breaking the code of "the social-linguistic construction of reality" , showing how it works by example, and combing out some consistent, correctable errors in the construction procedures by which we usually construct our "reality."

rshow55 - 02:37pm Aug 22, 2002 EST (# 3896 of 3904)

from May 24th 2001, continued

"We've been at that for about a year now - the first big chunk of it we'd show others is in the "Paradign Shift - Whose Getting There" thread here on the Guardian. Where, if you look, you'll see how far we had to go, and how much the work we've done has been a partnership effort.

"We've kept talking about social-logical construction of "reality", thinking about it, and kept trying to make it clearer and clearer, more and more condensed. We think we've gotten somewhere.

"To ask "where clarity comes from" is also to ask "where muddle comes from" -- and though we've had plenty of muddle ourselves, we've taken advantage of it by trying to find patterns of muddles -- screw-ups that happen again and again. Paradigm conflicts were part of that. Wars and fights other parts.

"To get a sense of the vastness of the sea, it helps to spend some time near one -- some time on one.

"To get a sense of the vastness of human creativity -- at least human technical creativity -- I don't think you can do better than to really WORK, really sweat a while -- work till your eyes blear and your head spins -- work for some days -- searching patents, in a good place, where the patents are sorted in piles of paper, and you go through maybe a foot of paper an hour -- looking at stereotyped pictures, and sometimes stereotyped language, looking for patterns. Where you're supposed to find any patterns that might be there. For score, or for money.

"If there's any intellectual training at all I'd like to recommend intellectual folks, that would be it.

"You do it for a while, and you lose any sharp sense of your own basic uniqueness. Other people are creative, too. Other people dream, and have ideas convert to clear patterns, too. Other people can make fools of themselves, and mislead themselves and others, too. And there is more product of human thinking, good and bad (just in the form of patents) than any human being can fit into their head, or begin to. -- It is like a SEA of discourse.

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