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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 - 09:12am Dec 18, 2002 EST (# 6829 of 6832)
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.

3082 rshow55 7/16/02 7:19am reposted the following, and I feel like posting it again, to review some things:

rshowalter - 04:48am Jul 29, 2001 EST #7562

. . . .

" There's a problem with long and complex. And another problem with short. . . . . The long and the short of it, I think, is that you need both long and short."

In the end - I'd like to help get across some simple messages:

1. Missile defense is not only a bad strategic idea -- it is also a huge technical fraud, with no technical viability whatsoever, and that can be shown in public.

2. The US military industrial complex is now, in decisive ways, fundamentally fraudulent and corrupt.

3. For a while, the rest of the world has to take responsibility for action without dependence on the cooperation of the United States, or deference to its good judgement, until some basic issues in the United States get righted.

The problem with these messages is not that they are complicated, but that people are not yet ready to hear them, in ways that can let them "detonate" through the culture, as true ideas, at the right time, can do. But people are more ready than before. The flow of the news, and editorial opinion, in this paper and many others, worldwide, illustrates that.

Let me cite a poem, that I feel is fairly concise, on the issue of "detonation" -- Chain Breakers . . . . http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee79f4e/618

. . . . . . . . .

Are words like fraudulent or corrupt or (good or bad) judgement justifiable? Doesn't it depend on point of view?

It does depend on point of view.

Some points of view are better or worse than others, in terms of defined assumptions - and this is clear, whether you happen to agree with the assumptions or not.

rshow55 - 09:13am Dec 18, 2002 EST (# 6830 of 6832)
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.

I thought Living Under the Virtual Volcano of Video Games This Holiday Season By VERLYN KLINKENBORG http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/opinion/16MON4.html was brilliant, beautiful and distinguished, and it had a phrase that jumped out at me - and might interest others. Klinkenborg's piece ends:

"In a way, nothing can teach you more about the modern obsession with entertainment than a sojourn in the world of video games. The best of them take hours of practice to get good at, and they contain hundreds of hours of play once you do get good. The real question is always, "What are you getting good at?," and "virtual volleyball" just doesn't seem like answer enough. But there are at least two good answers to that question, neither of them very satisfying to critics. The first is that every human activity, serious or playful, eventually ramifies into a world of its own, a self-contained cosmos of enormous complexity. The other answer is $10 billion."

If only this idea were widely understood - thoughout our culture, and many cultures in the world:

. every human activity, serious or playful, eventually ramifies into a world of its own, a self-contained cosmos of enormous complexity.

We now have machine assisted "virtual realities" that interface so well with human imagination and thought that people spend a lot of money and time on them. They do so because these machine-made virtual realities fit and supplement the natural patterns of "virtual reality" that go on in people's minds.

Our understanding are virtual realities, too. Sometimes the "games" we play, the simulations we do, are dangerous, expensive and ugly. The "games" we play are good so often, that there's plenty to hope for, but plenty to fear.

If people could actually accept that the only "reality" that they can have - at the level of "knowledge" and belief is virtual - in the plain sense of "contained in their head" - - a lot would clarify.

We naturally develop different "little universes" of great complexity in our heads - as individuals and groups. When we start checking these "virtual universes" for consistency with respect to themselves - and with respect to facts in the world that can be matched against - and the process of "connecting the dots" continues - a lot can clarify. If more people were clear that their beliefs were virtual - and that the beliefs of other people and groups were also virtual - - we'd all be a lot safer.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense