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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.

commondata - 07:16am Jan 9, 2003 EST (# 7502 of 7505)

World on path to disaster, bomb pioneer warns.

Defence analysts at Guardian non-proliferation conference see increased risk of atomic war

gisterme 1/9/03 3:43am - [Europeans] are not ungrateful for what the US has done for them in the past.

LOL. Thanks for waiting 5 years until Pearl Harbor was bombed, thanks for nuking Japan and thanks for your 80 bucks. Can we move on now?

rshow55 - 08:14am Jan 9, 2003 EST (# 7503 of 7505)
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.

In 7479 rshow55 1/8/03 9:42am I made this hopeful comment, which I believe is absolutely true.

"Everything that people are wanting to do, that they can decently and clearly explain in public - to all the people they really do have to be able to explain it to - can go much better.

"A lot of things are happening that look very right.

. . .

Sometimes there do have to be fights.

But not nearly as expensive as the ones we've been having.

We have to take time - time that we have - and use skills that we have - and find ways to be careful enough for decency and stability for all concerned.

7484 ends

We should be able to take the incidence of death, agonly, and dislocation from war way down. We ought not to blow it.

Gisterme made some interesting comments - and I noticed them, but just for now - I found 7495 especially interesting and fitting. It deals with listening, understanding, foresight, and imperfection:

7495 gisterme 1/9/03 3:03am writes this:

lunarchick 1/8/03 7:21pm

. "...If someone has knowledge and wisdom and shares it ... they still have the same knowledge and wisdom ...

"True.

. "...but .... those they share it with gain and are enriched..."

"Only if those the wisdom is shared with listen and understand. They have ears; but, too often they listen a while, then decide they don't want to hear. Murder follows. (emphasis added)

Imperfection (sometimes, indeed, including murder) usually follows. How big, how manageable, and how tolerable is the specific, predictable pattern of imperfection likely to be in a specific case?

We need to be able to handle questions like that much better - much more abstractly - much more formally - much more specifically - much more comfortably - much more openly - much more easily. "Whatever you do is wrong" is almost always a correct statement to some extent.

But how big are the errors - and when bad things follow - how forseeable, and gracefully controllable are they?

We can do a lot better than we're doing. Issues of order, symmetry, and harmony are important - and there are orders within orders - sequences - patterns that we need to sort out better, more clearly, and in more communicatable ways than we have been doing. We can.

Some "infinite series" are useless, or intractable, or unstable, but others - the ones on which a very large proportion of higher math is based - are quite tractable - very stable - very compact - and beautiful. It depends on sequences and how, and in what order - the successive approximations to specific assumptions happen to be constructed.

We can do much better than we've been doing. With a lot more prosperous and peaceful outcomes - and less war and agony.

In 7495 gisterme 1/9/03 3:03am gisterme points out that a person has to be careful what one reveals - after all "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" - - and I get the point - and have been worrying about it a long time. People cope. Ignorance often be more dangerous still.

We solve problems in SERIES of steps - - and the series used in computers, including hand held ones you can buy for a few bucks - offer a clarifying example. They work - predictably . Negotiations to achieve stable and harmonious relations can, too.

Sorts, and corrections, can do very well when they happen in ordered, symettric, harmonious sequences.

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