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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 - 07:11pm Feb 26, 2003 EST (# 9314 of 9314)
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.

An interesting story - and an interesting, but old, old story - how long it took to get this out:

Day Before Disaster, Engineers Raised Concerns on Shuttle Wing By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 6:00 PM ET http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Shuttle-Investigation.html

Senior NASA engineers raised concerns that the shuttle's left wing might burn off on re-entry, but they did not warn superiors.

9205 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.9kgkaTZD4gw.175523@.f28e622/10731

9241 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.9kgkaTZD4gw.175523@.f28e622/10767

9242 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.9kgkaTZD4gw.175523@.f28e622/10768

We need logical tools, and human insights, that make closure possible, and agreements resiliant, to a degree that they haven't been before.

9040 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.9kgkaTZD4gw.175523@.f28e622/10566 reads:

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.

But our "logic" - is mostly a choosing between many alteratives going on or being fashioned in our heads - and in the course of that choosing - people believe what "feels right."

But what "feels right," most often, is what, in our minds "cooperates with the interests of authority - with our group." Look at Pritchard's notes on Milgram's experiment - and on Jonestown - to get a sense of how wrong it feels, for most people, to go against authority. http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~epritch1/social98a.html

We need to face the fact that there is more need to check - especially when "the ties that bind" are involved - than people feel comfortable.

On this thread, again and again, there have been technical arguments - and with absolutely stunning, monotonous regularity - gisterme presents arguments that make no technical sense at all - that are perversely wrong - and feels right about them.

That's because gisterme tends to "believe what he wants to believe" - and is dependent on staffs that fear him - and have been "pleasing the boss" rather than getting right answers for a long time. NASA ought to have known the risks the instant the foam collision on take-off occurred -- and didn't.

The FBI should have KNOWN enough to investigate the clues it had before 9/11.

We're dealing here with nonrandom, basic patterns of human behavior that get us into messes. We need to face them. If we did - we could do better.

We ought to think about the behavior set out in http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~epritch1/social98a.html and realize that if we're "wired to be nice" - that is - to be cooperative - we're also "wired to be self deceptive and stupid" whenever the immediate thought seems to go against our cooperative needs.

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/413

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/414

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