21 November 2001
Today I want to discuss the past, the present, and the future: the space race, military tribunals, and remote control vehicles.
Maybe it was something I read, or something I saw on the History Channel. The US offered a seat to a Soviet Cosmonaut on Apollo 11.
What an amazing 10 year run that was. We were lousy in 1961. The Soviets were first at everything - first to orbit a satellite, first man in space, first man to orbit. We were playing catch up and we had to dust off all of our German scientists to do it!
I remember thinking of the Space Race just like I thought of the race in the National League West. My team was winning some and losing some, but they were my team. I was a major homer for the US Space Program. It was right there in Houston, so I was even more parochial about it.
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. Bigger boosters, EVA's, counting orbits for their own sake. They went three orbits? Let's go ten.
We got to the moon in 1969. We won the space race and both the Soviets and the US stopped working right away. We left the moon faster than we left Viet Nam - 1972 versus 1974. No one has been there since. I hear that there are some Hasselblad cameras up there. I used to want one, but now I'd rather have a digital.
The Space Race may have been the best microcosm of the cold war. Without shooting at each other, the west and the east went toe to to to prove which culture could produce the best results. What a colossal and stupid waste of resources! From this vantage point, cooperation would have made so much more sense than competition. Have we learned anything from that?
If it was 1969 again, would the Soviets take us up on it and send a man to the moon with us? I didn't know that we had offered, but I'm glad to learn it. Maybe someone in the US thought it was for everybody, not just a propaganda project.
The President of the US wants to use military tribunals to try terrorists. It might be due to the quasi military nature of the 9/11 attacks - were they civil crimes or war? It might also be due to the nature of our advantage - we're winning the information war and might not want our enemies to know how what we know.
I'm confused myself. At first, I thought, "This is War!" Then I thought, "No, these are just gangs. We can't dignify them with the title of Enemy of the State. They're just criminals and deserve jail." Well, I don't think I want to see these goobers hire lawyers that lie about as fast as Bill Clinton's lawyers did. All over the TV. On CNN. I don't want to pay for their soapbox. I don't even want them on Jerry Springer.
Okay, I think, that's fine. But the US still shouldn't just arrest or kill whoever it suspects. There should be a burden of proof, a rule of law. This is the open country of open government. People should be able to face their accusers and the public should be able to see the evidence. What check and balance exists if we don't follow the laws?
Great, now I feel strongly both ways. I recall that often, in civil suits, the judge puts a gag order on the parties. I wonder if we could try terroristas in criminal trials, with all the rules, the salad bar, media observers, everything - except gag the participants and observers until the verdict is rendered. Then I start thinking about 20 years of appeals, and I get angry and want to see the terrorists die right away.
I'm sure that the leadership of this country is a lot stronger than I am, and can make up their minds on this issue. But I wonder if part of the reason that we don't want public trials is something else - security of our information gathering abilities. There is a tremendous advantage to our commanders in the field to be able to see everything that the opponent is doing and, at the same time, have him guessing about your current manuever. We enjoy a great advantage in the Information War in Afghanistan. Would we still have such an advantage in the Sudan, or Iraq, if we told everyone how we knew that a given suspect was involved? Maybe not. Maybe it would reveal the identity of an american spy if we told them what we knew. Maybe they could tell where our special forces are.
Presently, the president says that he needs the power of tribunals for terrorists. I think that someone should give us a better reason for tribunals than just saying that we need them. The interests of the people have to be represented. If we need secrecy, we still need representative oversight. If we don't need secrecy, let's find a reasonable way to hang these people without giving them a megaphone first.
In Afghanistan, the US Military is using unmanned planes that are flown by persons back in the States. This was always an inevitable result of making the game program "Missile Command." Young children are capable of performing amazing feats with such games. They can keep track of more things than an Airport Flight Controller.
We are flying drone planes over Afghanistan, such as the Predator, with a guy sitting back in Missouri. We've flown a plane from California to Australia without anyone aboard, and had an unassisted landing, too. I wonder if we might not soon have cars that we can drive to the office by remote control. Just park them in the parking lot. Telecommute all day and then drive the car back to the driveway. Then they could lower the number of passengers required for the HOV lane to one person.
I wonder if I couldn't also operate a holographic version of me. While I sit at home in my socks, my appearance could show up at the office, sit in meetings, talk to other people, answer the phone, maybe even type on a computer in another town. There's no real reason that I couldn't put that hologram anywhere on Earth. I can imagine a meeting where none of the participants is really there - just a discussion between our homonculi. I could have a meeting on four different continents in a single morning and still have time to play real golf that afternoon.
Maybe someday we'll have a world where real people only do what they want, while shades do everything else with smoke and mirrors. I wish more people would do just what they want now, today, instead of waiting for science to invent a remote control person first.