Solar system stuff.

[peter]

Our ability to appreciate beauty is perhaps the one and only thing that we contribute to the whole that is not detrimental.[Don't know, but this may be true.]

[Avatar]

Well, that ability wars against the ability to destroy everything, so maybe everything won't be destroyed after all.

--A

[peter]

Here's Hoping!

[Vraith]

Well, that ability wars against the ability to destroy everything, so maybe everything won't be destroyed after all.

--A

Except that for almost everyone sometimes, and almost all the time for some ones, especially the power-driven, war is a beautiful thing...or even sublime.

I remember quite clearly much of the world mesmerized by the assault on Iraq, the missiles and bombs.
Hardly a word about the dying.

[Avatar]

It's always been like that. That's how they get a new generation willing to go out and die for them.

--A

[peter]

Strangely, the progress in technology in the area's of cybernetics, robotics, minitureisation etc, etc together with a higher percieved general value (and demand for political culpability) in respect of human life and its shedding, are resulting in ever higher levels of unmanned attack vehicles being developed with ever increasing accuracy and controll in respect of their 'killing zone' in order to limit 'collateral damage'. We truly are headed toward a state where one sides robots fight with another sides robots until victory by one (or a stalemate) is achieved. We may well yet see 'war without tears'.

Another point that has to be considered is the increasingly anachronistic nature of conventional warfare (even with high tech stuff as above) in our 'brave new' digitised world. As the man said "You don't need to drop a nuclear bomb on a country to get it to surrender these days - just switch of it's power for a week."

[Avatar]

...ever higher levels of unmanned attack vehicles being developed with ever increasing accuracy and control in respect of their 'killing zone' in order to limit 'collateral damage'...

Uh, by the people with the tech. Great, now they're not even facing the same type of risk, or requiring the same type of commitment as the people without it that they're up against.

--A

[peter]

...ever higher levels of unmanned attack vehicles being developed with ever increasing accuracy and control in respect of their 'killing zone' in order to limit 'collateral damage'...

Uh, by the people with the tech. Great, now they're not even facing the same type of risk, or requiring the same type of commitment as the people without it that they're up against.

--A

Well, the days of the people who make the wars being out in the front of them are long gone, but anything that replaces the wholesale slaughter of WW's I & II etc has got to be a lesser evil I would think. I think the point is that 'war' in the sense that we have understood it is rapidly fading into the past and that the 'new' world of interconnectedness, miniturisation and instant accountability demands new approaches to new (or even old) problems.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

instant accountability

Instant accountability? For whom? The people who actually push the button?

When war is conducted in a detached manner to the point where you aren't even close the battlefield then there is no accountability.

We aren't going to destroy the planet because we can't. Even if we exploded all the nuclear bombs and regular explosive at one time within 50 years of the last human dying most of the damage will be undone, except for areas of high radiation. Except for sturdy buildings it will be as if we were never here after only 100 years. That is how ephemeral we are.

[Avatar]

Agreed Hashi.

...anything that replaces the wholesale slaughter...

My point is that it's only reducing it on one side. And that's the side that, in modern conflicts, would have the least casualties anyway.

Push a button, wipe out a family gathering because one guy there is believed to be a terrorist, and go have lunch.

Maybe if you can't do it up close and personal, you don't deserve to be able to do it at all?

--A

[peter]

Well, there are numerous bestial examples of humanity in history who I would be happy to have expunged from a distance at the push of a button and (I think) would feel little guilt at having done so [qualifier; With the bennefit of the knowledge of what these people have (or are said to have) done this is easy] and I'm not sure that deserving or otherwise really comes into it. I do take the point about the absolute coldness of being so removed from your victims that your empathy for them is reduced to effectively zero - and this being less than ideal. All necessary violence - and some *is* necessary - should be carried out with regret, but because people are removed from the site of their actions does not I think always have to mean that their actions will be performed without consideration or indeed sorrow. To think so is to make us less than we are (or at least less than we are capable off). If the aim of any weponry development is the reduction of human casualties and destruction while still achieving that which sometimes must be done, then I find it hard (in realist terms) to find fault with it. Of course I don't like it - I don't like killing of any kind - but in the world of *realpolitic* there are greater and lesser evils and this may be one of the latter.

Hashi - perhaps the term 'instant accountability' is misleading. What I meant is that it is becoming harder for perpetrators of acts of violence to hide them in the face of mobile phone and internet technology. Acts pictured as they happen in real time can be broadcast instantly for the world to view and in no less time the public can respond in like or dislike terms to that which they have seen. No - it's not accountability, but by God it will make people think before they *do* press that button.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Hashi - perhaps the term 'instant accountability' is misleading. What I meant is that it is becoming harder for perpetrators of acts of violence to hide them in the face of mobile phone and internet technology. Acts pictured as they happen in real time can be broadcast instantly for the world to view and in no less time the public can respond in like or dislike terms to that which they have seen. No - it's not accountability, but by God it will make people think before they *do* press that button.

One would hope that they would think twice before pushing a button, knowing that the button will kill someone. I have an odd view on lethal violence--if you are going to go through the act of killing someone you had better have the balls to look them in the eye before killing them. At the same time, I also adhere to the opinion that sniping is perfectly acceptable even though snipers normally do not look their targets in the eye. Still...sniping seems more respectable to me somehow but this might be because they are modern assassins and I have a history of playing assassins in roleplaying games, thus my views are clearly biased.

Although we normally get daily death counts from areas of active military action, we do not get the daily visual images like we got during the Vietnam War. The nightly news footage helped foster a lot of anti-war sentiment in those days as people saw the cost of war with their own eyes. All we get these days are black-and-white numbers on a screen and that actually means nothing to us.

[Vraith]

Hee...this will actually be on-topic.
Don't have a link, cuz heard it on the news, and about to call it a night,
but:

Sometime soon [wasn't paying attention, missed the date/time] a comet is going to pass less than 90,000 miles above Mars. That's really close...and rare...I think they said once every 8 million years. Anyway, that's kinda cool.
Even cooler: apparently, all or most of the gear we have on/near Mars is gonna be able to get a look at it. The guy talked fast, and I haven't been keeping count of our stuff out and about the Solar system...but seemed like at least 5, maybe 7 or 8 different machines.

Just strikes me as really nifty to be doing astro-stuff not OF another world, but FROM another one.

[wayfriend]

Look Out, Mars! Comet Siding Spring's Flyby Stirs Up a Buzz

87,000 miles.

Thanks for the heads up.