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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 - 12:24pm Feb 17, 2003 EST (# 9040 of 9041)
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's a great deal to hope for - if people keep at the matching process - keep asking each other to look at evidence - and present information well enough - and completely collected enough.

For all their faults, deceptions, and self deceptions, people don't want to be monsters - and don't want to be stupid.

The physical and logical interactions of the world are complex enough that "reasonable" answers - patterns that really hang together when connected - are very sparse. For this reason, right answers very often converge. With enough effort - the odds of getting good answers are excellent.

People believe what feels right. But after enough evidence - enough care - quite often we almost always, almost all of us, feel right about the same things.

That's the "logic" behind human logic - and very often it works very,very well.

Especially when people use their aesthetic sense - the basic sense of proportion, of rightness -built into us. Poets can help with that. http://poetsagainstthewar.org/

People believe what feels right to them - and that is the way we reason - that is our "logic."

It is the only logic we have - and human beings need to understand that much more clearly than they have. We'd have more to be proud of, and less to fear, if we just faced up to how good we are, and aren't, as reasoning (or rationalizing) beings.

We won't agree on everything - or even very much. But if, when it matters - we keep looking, and remember the fallibility that we all have - we can do very well - much better than human beings have historically done.

There are procedures - not difficult with technical resources today - that can do very well at finding the kinds of truth - the patterns of fact - that matter for action. We need to find the will to use them.

Maybe we're moving towards that.

rshow55 - 12:25pm Feb 17, 2003 EST (# 9041 of 9041)
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 think the TIMES has done a fine job covering the space shuttle disaster, and commenting on it Fixing the Shuttle Inquiry http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/opinion/16SUN2.html and I was moved by the report today:

After Liftoff, Uncertainty and Guesswork By DAVID BARSTOW http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/national/nationalspecial/17RECO.html

The left wing. For days after the Columbia was launched, small teams of engineers and technicians from NASA and the shuttle program's contractors had been consumed by the left wing. Some 81 seconds after liftoff, the wing had been struck by perhaps the largest piece of debris ever to hit a space shuttle. Roughly the size and weight of an empty briefcase, it had slammed the wing's underside at about 500 miles per hour, smashing into fragile, easily damaged tiles that protected the Columbia from searing heat.

The public knew nothing of the effort to nail down the precise dimensions and location of the damage. NASA's highest officials were only dimly aware of engineering detective work. But Mr. Cain, 39, had been part of the deliberations. He, too, had ultimately dismissed the debris strike as a potential threat.

Now, as the Columbia streaked across California and toward oblivion over Texas, Mr. Cain's mind flashed to its liftoff, and the moment that mysterious chunk of debris exploded against the left wing. "That was the first thing that entered my mind," he said in an interview, recalling that terrible Saturday morning.

In the two weeks since the Columbia disappeared from his monitors, Mr. Cain has not seen anything that has caused him to doubt the conclusion he and other managers had reached. "On the overall, I feel confident in our processes," he said.

The contrast between this story and some of Ronald Ditmore's televised statements that "nobody was seroiously worried about the tiles" - statements that were apparently sincere - is garish.

Why on earth should Mr Cain, or anybody else, feel "confident in our processes" ?

We need to find processes that we can be reasonably confident in.

Maybe we're moving toward that. Lunarchick and I are working hard, trying to move that effort along. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/157

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