New weapons technologies
 

The USA: US draws up plans for nuclear drones | World news | The Guardian

And Russia:Russia Eyes Development of Futuristic Weaponry | Defense | RIA Novosti

The future is here. And it is almost as mad as "Iron Sky".

We were up to madder things in the Cold War. :P

I should watch Dr Strangelove again soon.

The weapons from the Cold war are still there. The new things just add a little bit to the threat. Actually they add a lot because the Cold war was about MAD (mutually assured destruction), so no one dared to really use this. But a nuclear powered drone here, a little genetically engineered virus there ... who will respond with atomic bombs to that little thing....

How about building terminators? You can win 2 million US-$, taking part in a DARPA programme:

2012/04/10 DARPA seeks robot enthusiasts and you to face off for $2M prize

"The primary goal of the DARPA Robotics Challenge program is to develop ground robotic capabilities to execute complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered (vice natural) environments. The program will focus on robots that can use available human tools, ranging from hand tools to vehicles. The program aims to advance the key robotic technologies of supervised autonomy, mounted mobility, dismounted mobility, dexterity, strength, and platform endurance."

or this:

"In the DARPA Robotics Challenge, robots will compete with each other performing disaster response operations in representative scenarios that will likely include the following sequence of events:
1. Drive a utility vehicle at the site.
2. Travel dismounted across rubble.
3. Remove debris blocking an entryway.
4. Open a door and enter a building.
5. Climb an industrial ladder and traverse an industrial walkway.
6. Use a tool to break through a concrete panel.
7. Locate and close a valve near a leaking pipe.
8. Replace a component such as a cooling pump.
These are representative tasks and will likely be updated based on detailed future planning that will take into account safety, cost, performance, operational capabilities and needs.
Figure 1 illustrates Event 6 (the robot on the right-hand side using a power tool) and Event 7 (the robot on the left-hand side turning a valve). The form of these robots is for illustration only; while the robot must be compatible with human operators, environments and tools, there is not a requirement that it have a humanoid form."

You can see the illustration mentioned in the DARPA announcement (PDF file) on page 6... of course, they're not going to build anything humanoid, resembling certain James Cameron movie visions, do they???

Link to the PDF: https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=74...a46b9c21597f30

Wiggling bare toes, afarid to see military robots wiggle metallic toes soon,

~*Txim Asawl*~

Everyone? That's the point: threaten the stability of Russia or the US (or any other nuclear power) by any means and you get blown off the map. Nukes aren't only good against nukes; nukes are good against everything.

Another one to add to your checklist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope_fallacy

With the possible exception of Iran (who are all religious nutcases), nobody is stupid enough to precipitate a conflict that will get themselves wiped out.

^Ehh North Korea is a tad touched as well.

Well, they had to start building more weapons eventually. No big deal, they'll just kill each other in different ways.

Did you adress me with the slippery slope thingy? Or Clarke? Because what I said was that there will NOT be a nuclear retaliation if someone uses one of these new weapons, and that this is sort of a bad thing compared to nukes. See, if a country attacks another one with something really devastating that is traceable to them, like a rocket with a nuclear warhead on it, as it was the common threat in the cold war, it risks nuclear counterstrikes that are devastating. But with more powerful "conventional" weapons, one can have wars. Like the US has with the weaponry they used in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the other party will not reply with something like nukes. Some of these weapons sound even like they can be made non-traceable (e.g. biological weapons), which would result in no clear opponent to attack.
More advanced weapons are never really a good idea. Never.

If they would just "kill each other", I could not care less. But weapons kill and usually they dont really care about whom they kill. In modern warfare, the civilian casualties are considerable...

Honestly, not even North Korea. They had a single failed test which bankrupted them along with several failed ICBM tests, and they have what they need for posturing purposes; now they've got their hands full with other problems anyway.

Really?
:rolleyes:

That stuff has existed since the cold war, sorry to correct you.

The slippery slope fallacy really is fun, isn't it?

I disagree. When countries like Iran, North Korea, China, Egypt, Pakistan or Syria exist, people need a deterrent. There was no deterrent in WW1 or WW2, and the result was an actual war.

You're seriously misinformed.

WW1: ~950,000 direct; ~5.9 million indirect
WW2: ~30 million
Vietnam: ~4 million
Gulf War: ~4800
Iraq: ~66,081 (Wikileaks, including terrorist attacks)

If there was no reason for humans to have wars, I'd be very happy, but as long as there are 7 billion people on one planet (and no post-scarcity society), as long as there are territorial disputes, fuel scarcities, and ideologies such as communism or various religions, there will always be problems.

If I'm allowed to be a bit of a pessimist for a moment though, we do have an overpopulation problem.

Overpopulation is pretty much the root of all problems.

Apart from all the ones caused by tribalism.

Shall we just nuke each other now and get it over with? All this long, drawn out warfare is really boring and needless when there's weapons we could wipe everyone out with.

http://i680.photobucket.com/albums/v...8ea92fa3d9.jpg

It really sucks with nukes, most are toast even if they had nothing to do with the conflict.

Now, if they could come up with weapons that only target political leaders, then I would be impressed.

Both extremely true...

Oh, and we mustn't forget the various cognitive problems people have with modern society. (e.g. a crap ability to value and predict the future.)

It's amazing we've lasted as long as we have, really. :D

While it's not new technology (ICBMs capable of carrying nuclear payload are vintage stuff), this piece of news plus some spiritual background just fits the picture:

"Agni (Sanskrit: अग्नि) is a Hindu deity, one of the most important of the Vedic gods. He is the god of fire and the acceptor of sacrifices. The sacrifices made to Agni go to the deities because Agni is a messenger from and to the other gods. He is ever-young, because the fire is re-lit every day, and also immortal.

Agni, the Vedic god of fire, has two heads, one marks immortality and the other ...marks an unknown symbol of life has made the transition into the Hindu pantheon of gods, without losing his importance. With Varuna and Indra he is one of the supreme gods in the Rig Veda. The link between heaven and earth, the deities and the humans, he is associated with Vedic sacrifice, taking offerings to the other world in his fire. In Hinduism, his vehicle is the ram."

(Source: Wikipedia)

"Agni V" is the name of the new long-distance missile tested today at 8.05 am local time by the DRDO, the defence and research development organization in India. Capable of carrying nuclear warheads and with a range of 6,400 kilometres (3,977 miles), the missile can reach any target within China and (theoretically) also targets in Europe and the Middle East.

Its successor, Agni VI, with a range of around 6,000 kilometres as well, is planned to be an SLBM, submarine-launched, capable of carrying MIRVs (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles), thereby capable of being aimed at multiple targets...

If I were a deity, I would spank the people responsible for naming that thing, for abusing my name in this way...

This, yet again, is sad... very sad only!

~*Txim Asawl*~

I think calling a nuclear-tipped missle after the god of fire is perfectly appropriate. :P

Even more ironic would have been "Ganesh - remover of obstacles" :shoop:

~*Txim Asawl*~

I still dont get it. Maybe you can explain to me how this applies to this discussion. Obviously you are the one who has learned some theories of debates. I dont see how what I read on that Wikipedia article applies to this

Yes, the "Cold War" strategy works. But do you really want to define peace as the absence of actual war? I don't. For me, calling the time that lasted until I was ending my teenage years in the early 1990'ies did not really feel like peace, even if there was no actual war. Living daily with the knowledge that the city I live in would be among the first ones to be hit by a nuclear bomb if someone freaks out or one of the people in what was then the very small "internet" actually managed to hack into the military and simulate an attack or if some nutcase just thinks that it is a great idea to nuke someone because someone builds military bases on Cuba or there are misguided sattelite rockets flying in the wrong direction.
An "equilibrium of deterrents" is a situation that looks like peace because there are no "actual wars" with people shooting at each other, but it is a psychological war that affects all. This is at best a temporary solution to a conflict that would otherwise be worse, but it cannot be a permanent solution.

I just glanced over Wikipedia to check these and found that for Iraq, the numbers diverge - some sources speak of 1 million deaths if you include all secondary causes, like the 6 resp 30 million for the WWs (which include things like people starving or dying of sickness because their cities have been bombed)

Also one has to note the extent of the conflict in comparison with the casualties. WWI and WWII are called "world wars" for a reason - they involved several countries, not merely two or three major players. Vietnam was a war about a rather small (in population) country and that is even more true for Iraq. And I would call everything beginning with WWI "modern warfare" actually. More technology allowed these wars to escalate like they did with mass bombings and one of the first uses for computers (made by IBM) was to do a census and to do accounting to determine who and how many people were sent to the death camps in WWII.

So the main reason why more recent wars had less casualties was because they were smaller conflicts and that in turn can, as you mentioned, be traced back to the use of fear as a weapon. Mutually assured destruction and a equilibrium of deterrants prevented conflicts between larger countries to play out in a direct way. One of the results of this by the way is that there are more conflicts in smaller countries which are used as proxies for these larger powers. Like Afghanistan where the US fought Russia in a puppetmaster war, each party giving funds and weapons to a strawman who then fought the war for them. It is another form of externalization of undesireable things (like the western countries externalized production of polluting industries to China and India so now they can claim to be all so green and clean while they import all the products from these countries)

Then we'd better find a proper solution to these because there will not be a "post scarcity society" and people will always on any levels squabble about land rights. And almost anything political is an ideology like capitalism, the free market or neoliberalism - or communism. I guess what we are left is is to find ways to properly deal with scarcity (by a fair distribution of scarce stuff and general trends to move away from scarce resources) and land right disputes (diplomacy). We'll have to choose an ideology that works and that is fair. Capitalism and neoliberalism based on competition are rarely fair and lead to large inequalities that promote envy and disputes. If one country outcompeted another and becomes wealthy, while another stays poor and has to pay for that wealth, I think the solution cannot be to threaten each other with nuclear bombs or therelike but the solution has to be that some fair situation can be achieved in which no one is poor or rich but all do well. In this sense, a post scarcity world is even possible, namely if the resources that are available are distributed in such a fair way, that no one perceives them as scarce. A large part of the perception of scarcity is the comparison to others. One perceives a subjective scarcity of gasoline for example because one cannot afford to buy it as easiyl as someone else can. And even money is only scarce for those that have less than others - they do not perceive themselves as poor if there are no "others" that are very rich.

But on topic:
I still think, that some of these weapons can be used in hidden conflicts or in puppetmaster conflicts. They can be unleashed in secrecy (e.g. biological agents targeted at people with special genetic traits) by a proxy or be sold to people who then use them for some goal but certainly will not forget the generous provider of these weapons. There can be a lot of "Oops" moments.

"Oh noes new technology vaguely connected to nuclear energy means WW3!"
:facepalm:

Perhaps not, but the absence of war is necessarily part of peace.

Stop watching WarGames. That's like claiming humans exist in other galaxies because it was in star wars.

I agree; but it allows things to change for one to come into place. That can't happen if there's a war. If everyone was completely defenceless (or disorganised on anything more than a local level), all it would take was one country to take over the world.

Doesn't that support my point? 1 million including their murdering their own people; for a war that lasted almost twice as long :P

Also one has to note the extent of the conflict in comparison with the casualties. WWI and WWII are called "world wars" for a reason - they involved several countries, not merely two or three major players. Vietnam was a war about a rather small (in population) country and that is even more true for Iraq. And I would call everything beginning with WWI "modern warfare" actually.[/quote]
Because there are a lot of trenches and advancement measurable over hundreds of metres per year now, right?

Yay, reductio ad Hitlerum. Another for your list :P
I hate to break it to you, but the first computer was only invented DURING the war.

Isn't that the point?

Wrong once again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...0%E2%80%931944

You're trying to use as a point against me something that I've pointed out to you ad nauseam.

True enough: Overpopulation.

The only way to do that is to reduce population unless you want to take a lesson from Pol Pot (although I'm sure you personally probably do).

Yep. Much like communism, in fact.

I don't think your definition meshes with the generally held one; it's not a reimplementation of failed communist experiments. It means that everything is available to everyone in a manner that will not fall apart if everyone claims what they are entitled to.

So the answer is "we are all suffering equally"? I don't even need to point out the failures inherent in that.

Please learn basic biology.

Slippery slope argument again; it is so even bringing bioweapons into such an unrelated topic.