Shield Plans Flawed

joe,
What I'm trying to say is that the program itself IS worth it (Unless you like the thought of missiles falling unimpeded on our cities) but it is worth it on several levels.

Primarily to stop incoming ballistic threats and for all the great 'spinoffs' that it will create.

The point I was trying to make is that you have to look at the whole picture of what such a program will give us.

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It gives us empty pockets and no shield.

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It gives us Missile Command!

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Who, exactly, is going to be firing missiles at us?

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Sadam, who else?

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joefromchicago wrote:

Who, exactly, is going to be firing missiles at us?

To quote St. Reagan (all hail the hole-y one), "there you go again."
Sigh. joe, you know better than to confront the rightard's with questions like this! Now they are going to be confused and their feelings will be hurt. It isn't a matter of it actually stopping missiles, its about providing welfare fo the poor starving CES's of the aerospace companies. Wink

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Fedral -- I agree with you that spinoff products can be quite valuable, and may even justify many billions of dollars invested.

But why not apply the same logic everywhere? If we invest billions of dollars to find a cure for cancer, then perhaps as a fortunate side effect we might find that we've serendipitously created a missile defense system in space.

The technologies involved in fighting cancer can be just as versatile and powerful as military technologies, so why not fund military advances in this manner? Give money to cancer research and tell the defense contractors they can depend on huge benefits from the spinoff products!

Do you see any difference between the two?

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Careful. Hit them with too much logic and their brains explode. They need their little fantasy land.

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The more I see your posts Federal, the more conservative I realize I really am. Except for the fact that I actually want to help those that are worse off than me, I think I could be a great conservative.

As a med student, I gotta say most medical research is wasteful. Most biology research includes such trite things as pumping various earthworms with chemicals to see what effect they have and hopefully randomly find something with a positive effect. Sure they sometimes help discover a new drug or two, but pharmacetcial companies already invest billions into doing this. And with far more success since they invest in the promising fields instead of how the govt just throws money everywhere.

Physics research is very different. It's often not apparent how money can be made from it. So private investors rarely fund it. It's up to the governmend. And physics research does incredible things, from increasing our communication networks, to creating particle accelerators that help us discover and create particles that are expected to soon help us sustain controlled fusion reactions as a pollution free energy source, to discovering that 76% of the universe is made up of some invisible dark matter and energy that we aren't even aware of. Sure the practical advantage we gain from this maybe far off. But what about our desire to understand the universe. Isn't that important as well?

You can't possibly expect something like star wars to work from the get go. It's beyond our capabilities. Once we try more things, we will get it to work. And in the process, we will come up with some incredible technologies.

Technologies that will improve our speed and manuervability in space, technologies that will increase our tracking capabilities, technologies that will vastly improve our satellites (which power everything from the internet to the fancy navigation system in your honda accord) technologies that will someday let us and our allies including South Korea and Japan ignore North Korea's ICBM capabilities, technologies that will soon be replicated all over the world and nullify the usefulness of nuclear weapons. Despite what hollywood says, hijacking a nuclear sub and crusing undetected and smuggling nuclear weapons by ground into a foreign country aren't as easy as they seem. The world will be safer because of star wars.

Sending a man to mars, yeah that's pretty much pointless as we have already sent a robot much bigger than a man to mars and we stand to gain little from it. And sure there are lots of things that need money. But there are better things to cut than star wars. I know I'm going to piss off a lot of liberals by saying this, but just how useful a purpose does all this art funding serve anyways?

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Exploring other worlds may sound romantic, but even if we developed the technology to travel at the speed of light, which appears unlikely, it still wouldn't allow us to search our own tiny galaxy in less than several hundred thousand years. And I don't have any doubt at all that the human race won't last that long.

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Centroles wrote:

The more I see your posts Federal, the more conservative I realize I really am. Except for the fact that I actually want to help those that are worse off than me, I think I could be a great conservative.

As a med student, I gotta say most medical research is wasteful. Most biology research includes such trite things as pumping various earthworms with chemicals to see what effect they have and hopefully randomly find something with a positive effect. Sure they sometimes help discover a new drug or two, but pharmacetcial companies already invest billions into doing this. And with far more success since they invest in the promising fields instead of how the govt just throws money everywhere.

Physics research is very different. It's often not apparent how money can be made from it. So private investors rarely fund it. It's up to the governmend. And physics research does incredible things, from increasing our communication networks, to creating particle accelerators that help us discover and create particles that are expected to soon help us sustain controlled fusion reactions as a pollution free energy source, to discovering that 76% of the universe is made up of some invisible dark matter and energy that we aren't even aware of. Sure the practical advantage we gain from this maybe far off. But what about our desire to understand the universe. Isn't that important as well?

You can't possibly expect something like star wars to work from the get go. It's beyond our capabilities. Once we try more things, we will get it to work. And in the process, we will come up with some incredible technologies.

Technologies that will improve our speed and manuervability in space, technologies that will increase our tracking capabilities, technologies that will vastly improve our satellites (which power everything from the internet to the fancy navigation system in your honda accord) technologies that will someday let us and our allies including South Korea and Japan ignore North Korea's ICBM capabilities, technologies that will soon be replicated all over the world and nullify the usefulness of nuclear weapons. Despite what hollywood says, hijacking a nuclear sub and crusing undetected and smuggling nuclear weapons by ground into a foreign country aren't as easy as they seem. The world will be safer because of star wars.

Sending a man to mars, yeah that's pretty much pointless as we have already sent a robot much bigger than a man to mars and we stand to gain little from it. And sure there are lots of things that need money. But there are better things to cut than star wars. I know I'm going to piss off a lot of liberals by saying this, but just how useful a purpose does all this art funding serve anyways?

wilso, where in my post did you get the idea that i'm talking about explorign other worlds. i already said the mars mission is wasteful. i'm talking about starwars. it'll improve life and it's spinoffs will also improve life and answer questions about the universe while raising even more.

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I wasn't referring specifically to your post. Just to the topic in general.

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While the research may yield positive results, the policy behind it is terminally flawed. Instead of relying on a safety blanket that we know won't work, why not work to prevent the proliferation of ICBMs?

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because its too late for that. north korea has them. pakistan has them. both nations are run by dictators we can neither monitor nor trust. only an idealistic can believe that we can get rid of, or regulate the location and use of every nuke made thus far.

but to what level we can, we ARE trying to reduce/delay thier proliferation. prevention is impossible.

we know that we don't yet have all the technologies to make the safety blanket work. that's what the project is about. making the discoveries to make star wars work. but i say that the concept is definately possible. we will someday soon have the technology for star wars. we are just researching it now to get to that day sooner than later.

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Bush should be exploring the empty space in his head.

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1) Isn't a missle defense shield kind of like building
a greenhouse on top of a toxic waste dump?
If we destroy the environment as fast as we currently are,
then there won't be much left to defend in the first place.
Let's get our house in order first!

2) Guerilla warfare is gaurenteed to make any defense shield useless.
Spending billions of dollars on it will only turn us into whiners, who complain to
mommy that so-called terrorists aren't fighting wars "fairly". Our bad investment
in no way obligates guerilla fighters to follow "proper" rules and behave nicely!
What an embarassment to spend so much money.

3) IMO, traditional military is bloated and obsolete, nothing but a huge
anchor dragging us down. The only possible use for so much overkill power
is to pre-emptively dominate huge amounts of the world by force.
That's pretty much "the evil empire" in anybody's book! Those billions of
dollars could be building the world, rather than throwing it in jail.

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smiley

1.) Why not do both? That's what i advocate. We can work on the green house while redirecting other parts of the military budget like the 10 billion each new aircraft carrier costs on fixing the toxic waste dump.

2.) Missle defence isn't about protecting ourselves from terrorists. That's simply not possible. But the terror attacks are, however gruesome, isolated incidents. We can't realistically prevent them, but there is almost not chance of them throwing our entire society back to the stone ages either. In this light, terrorism by a few radicals doesn't hold a candle to all out nuclear war by a fanatical dictator with ICBMs. Missle defence is about preparing ourselves for the grim and unlikely but nevertheless significant possibility of someday being pulled into a nuclear war by some crazy dictator like the guy running North Korea or Pakistan. I don't think this will happen. I hope and pray that it doesn't. But are you willing to stake humanity itself being thrown back to the stone ages on what is probable?

3.) Agree with you on that. There are parts of the military budget that are wasteful. Our army is too large, we have too many weapons, too many bases and little use for either. But in my opinion research and development into things that aren't designed to kill people is never a waste. Technology including military technology has given us so much. The internet started out as a military endeavor to communicate more privately and efficently. People back then said that was a waste of money too. Now, millions of people from all parts of the world including oppressed parts of china can get together online and learn about democracy and the viewpoints of others in different parts of the world. Military air transport research paved the way for commercial jets. Military research is paving the way for new technologies like stun gases and stun guns that may make the killing of enemies even during war time unneccesary. And these are all direct examples. Virtually every invention we currently have is in some small way indirectly rooted in spinoffs of military research. I have no doubt that the technologies that will make star wars possible will someday also contribute greatly to both the progress of our society and our understanding of the universe.

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hobitbob wrote:

Sigh. joe, you know better than to confront the rightard's with questions like this! Now they are going to be confused and their feelings will be hurt. It isn't a matter of it actually stopping missiles, its about providing welfare fo the poor starving CES's of the aerospace companies.

I realize that it's impertinent to ask these sorts of questions. After all, if we build a missile defense shield, there must be someone out there who has missiles that need to be defended against -- otherwise, the shield would be a complete waste of money. And if no one currently has those kinds of missiles, well then by the time we finish the shield there ought to be plenty of "crazed dictators" out there with huge stockpiles of missiles. Of course, we could just take the money earmarked for the shield and give it out as foreign aid, so that there would be fewer countries that might want to fire missiles at us.

But then that's bad foreign policy. Better to antagonize as many nations as possible, and then build a shield to protect ourselves against all the enemies that we've made. That's the Bush Doctrine.

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Currently, I have to trust KIM Chong-il and General Pervez MUSHARRAF and the various other nuclear dictators out ther to be level headed enough to not start a nuclear war that will at best throw us back into the stone ages, at worst, wipe out humanity as we know it.

Now I do believe that neither of them is likely to do that. But I am also not completely convinced that Kim Chong-il especially is the sanest of people or that after him, some loonier guy is going to take his spot.

General Pervez MUSHARRAF is probably very sane. But this is what, like the fourth time in the past year that fundamental islamic radicals tried to assasinate him so they can take over the govt? If they suceed, they will do everything they can to launch those nukes.

They don't care about how much foreign aid we give out. Hell, they probably don't even care that they will start a nuclear war that will destroy civilization. To them, we are infidels, our civilization is evil and god himself commands them to destroy us. There is NOTHING we can possibly do to appease them.

MUSHARRAF is going to do everything he can to stop them from ceasing power. So are we. But they got pretty close the last time. (They set up a remote controlled bomb whose control fortunately was temporarily descrambled by the radios securities guards use for the few moments that MUSHARRAF's convoy passed by.) Eventually they WILL succeed. And I want to have a contention plan ready when they do. Civilization itself is at stake.

Duh, we don't have the technology to make star wars work now. That's the point of research and development, to figure out how to do that which we can't currently. I am certain that we can successfully get star wars up and running.

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Shield Plans Flawed

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