New York Times on the Web Forums Science

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?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 11:23am Sep 4, 2002 EST (# 4174 of 4174)
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.

There are reasons why these "obvious" things are hard to see - but important to remember. Plato's problem is connected to the difficulties of these "obvious" things - and the ease with which people often do "difficult" things, too.

Watching television is plainly a much more difficult logical act than doing symbolic logic at the level Bertrand Russell was able to do it. Yet easier, too.

We need to be clearer than we are about why. For practical and political reasons - including reasons of morality, comfort, and survival.

Here's an "obvious" fact. In our world, for basic reasons, an enormous fraction of the probabilities we face are essentially 0, or essentially 1. Looking at ratios of factorials, such as N!/(N/2)! , gives a basic reason why.

Knowing more about "the odds of that" in a statistical world where many things are causal can tell us a lot about how people can be as smart and beautiful as they are - and yet as stupid and ugly in other ways.

The information carries both hopes and warnings. And it can be learned.

I'm moving as carefully as I can - in part because I feel "under fire."

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense