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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?

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

lchic - 08:39am Sep 20, 2002 EST (# 4447 of 4451)

A scientist who studies whales below, coments on their 'call' for synchronicity ... for the pod to operate in unison - at critical times.

Raises thoughts re synchronicity in the political arena.

Aren't the Bush-Administrative Pod aiming to get their nation to follow their call and turn in unison 'to war' ...

:You've said killer whales may be as intelligent as we are, yet their language doesn't appear to have a huge vocabulary. What makes you think they're so smart?

- Some people argue that they're not that intelligent. A fellow I worked with at the US Navy believed that whales are no more intelligent than pigs. Then why aren't their brains the size of a pig's in relation to their body weight? And why would a killer whale need 15 years of childhood? Brain size is a dangling question. A large brain is an extremely expensive item to be carrying around in the ocean. For a mammal to carry a brain that large, it's got to be used. It may be required as a memory bank of the coastline, and they do seem to have an intimate knowledge of the coast. But it seems an awful lot of brainpower for that.

: But can you call their signalling a language?

- There are indications that they have a real language. Whales can lie side by side and have long acoustic exchanges that are not territorial displays or mating calls. But it's not a language like ours. It's going to take a blind leap to figure out how it works. One call I've studied confused me for a long time, because it occurred in such a wide range of behaviours that didn't seem to have any relationship to each other. Then it struck me that in all those behaviours, each whale in the group was focused on the same thing.

The call is associated with the act of synchronicity - whether it's turning around as a group, beginning a conversation or attending a birth. Synchronicity is a fundamental characteristic of orcas. It springs from the need to breathe with your mother to survive. If a baby whale doesn't roll to the surface and open its blowhole at exactly the same instant as its mother, it will not learn where the air is and it will die.

http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns236127

lchic - 08:54am Sep 20, 2002 EST (# 4448 of 4451)

Sea creatures prepare US for war ...

Richard Morecroft Goes Wild: Navy Seals (documentary)
A look at the journey of harbour seals from birth to adulthood and the similarities they share with US soldiers training to be elite Navy Seals.

Meantime the synchronicity isn't happening for Bush back in his own Empiredom!

http://abc.net.au/news/2002/09/item20020917000929_1.htm

lchic - 01:32pm Sep 20, 2002 EST (# 4449 of 4451)

Jeb's kid has a 'dimple' - right?

Grows weird plants in his own greenhouse - right!

Was concieved - not in the back of a chevy@theLevy - rather in a nuclear bunker - right!

She let's her dad fill in her voting slip(s)-right!

Was on the run, but now she surrenders - right!

lchic - 01:36pm Sep 20, 2002 EST (# 4450 of 4451)

chart

http://www.economist.com/images/20020921/CUS685.gif

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