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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.

rshow55 - 08:42pm Apr 5, 2002 EST (#1132 of 1148)

rshowalter - 07:28pm Jun 23, 2001 EST (#5904 of 5908)
Robert Showalter mrshowalter@thedawn.com

MD4618 rshowalter 6/8/01 3:22pm .... MD4619 rshowalter 6/8/01 3:22pm
MD4620 rshowalter 6/8/01 3:27pm .... MD4621 rshowalter 6/8/01 3:28pm
MD4622 rshowalter 6/8/01 3:30pm

We ought to think of ways to reduce the basic reasons for war - the reasons we feel the need to dominate the world -- and think of better things to do with our resources.

And, if energy was available, we'd know how to alleviate most world poverty. Now, we don't.

- - - - - .

rshowalter - 08:03pm Jun 23, 2001 EST (#5907 of 5908)
Robert Showalter mrshowalter@thedawn.com

Bush Is Revising Energy Policy to Address Global Warming by JOSEPH KAHN http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/10/politics/10ENER.html .... shows flexibility, and a willingness to consider conservation, and the use of renewable energy sources, including wind or solar power.

If the Bush administration could fashion better policies, and execute them well, better solutions to global warming than Kyoto might be fashioned, to the credit of the Bush administration.

Kyoto DOES offer a response to a major problem in need of a solution.

Research is ongoing on "carbon capture" -- where carbon is buried, taken out of the atmosphere Strategy Has a "Greenhouse" Gas Bottled up Under Land and Sea by Kenneth Chang http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/science/17CARB.html

" Now scientists and policy makers are exploring a third strategy: snaring carbon dioxide . . . and storing it in the ground or ocean.

" On Monday, President Bush said, "We all believe technology offers great promise to significantly reduce emissions, especially carbon capture, storage and sequestration technologies."

" That could eventually help the administration reconcile the divergent goals of its energy and climate policies, enabling the construction of power plants that burn fossil fuels while still cutting harmful emissions.

" "If you want to stabilize CO2 emissions over a long period of time, we think carbon sequestration is essential," said Robert S. Kripowicz, acting assistant secretary of energy for fossil energy.

" But current carbon dioxide scrubbers are too expensive. The Department of Energy has set $2.75 as a reasonable cost for storing a ton of carbon dioxide. Current technologies cost 15 to 20 times as much.

Could we learn to grow algae for $10/ton of carbon in the algae (molar equivalent to the $2.75 price for CO2) in the equatorial oceans, in large scale aquaculture -- and dump that hydrocarbon to the bottom of the ocean? It doesn't look impossible -- again, it would be a low tolerance approach to a big problem that the world needs solved - that is now a cause of conflict.

If it was possible, a lot of engineers (who can't get missile defense to work reliably, in my opinion) could figure out how to do it.

For the money that's been proposed for a missile defense few think will work, we could probably get this done.

rshow55 - 08:54pm Apr 5, 2002 EST (#1133 of 1148)

I'm about to take a break, watch "Washington Week In Review", and have a beer - - but to do the large scale solar energy job doesn't look that hard to me. If I were working with a team I used to have, and a guy who used to work for-with me (previously this guy was VP of Engineering for Ford -- the highest engineering position in the company) - we could get a LONG way into this job -- and so could a lot of other people.

The large scale aquaculture job (for animal feed, or carbon sequestration) isn't any harder.

Work to do. But easy tolerances -- many ways to get different key jobs done -- no likely "show stoppers."

In contrast, the NMD job is hard MD14-15 rshow55 3/1/02 6:07pm .

rshow55 - 09:53pm Apr 5, 2002 EST (#1134 of 1148)

MD1113 rshow55 4/5/02 1:03pm

Some of my background . . . was on this thread before March 2, and is now set out on a Guardian thread .. Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror

217-219 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?13@@.ee7a163/228

273-277 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?13@@.ee7a163/289

278-279 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/294

Yesterday, I summarized some of the work on this thread in http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/297

I went bankrupt on a large project that I was encouraged to do by the goverment, and at an early stage, partly funded to do, because Bill Casey, very late, decided that I couldn't be permitted to succeed until I finished a math job. The plug was pulled on some funding, something that former head of the SEC found easy to do -- Ford was left hanging on a half finished job I'd promised to do, and my investors and I lost 16.4 million dollars. (I was the general partner.) One of the people working on that project was S. J. Kline, who wrote this letter of recommendation some years afterwards. http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klinerec

I kept my end of the deal with Casey. But Casey died, and apparently I'm left hanging. Hanging under circumstances where the whole world ought to be concerned -- because everything that Eisenhower warned against in his Farewell address http://www.geocities.com/~newgeneration/ikefw.htm has happened. MD1064 rshow55 4/4/02 7:37am

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