Meeting notice: The 03.March.04 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. Suggested topic: War and NT (cont.) While there are plausible reasons to doubt that war will be a feature of NT-enabled societies, these reasons are social or cultural (i.e., life spans of ~100,000 years will probably make the risks and bloodletting of war even less tolerable than they are now). It is worth noting, however, that on technical grounds alone NT might be seen as a war enabler, since it holds out the prospect of a defense against weapons that in other contexts raise the cost of war well past unacceptable "Combat NT" also has the interesting feature of being highly unstable. By its nature the technology makes mobilization and logistics unimportant, which means that outcomes will turn on margins of technical superiority. A competitor who finds a way to add an increment of intelligence, or sensing, or reaction speed, to the arms cycle will dominate very quickly. The more mature NT becomes, the smaller the advantage required to be decisive; to reverse the arrangement produced by the previous advantage. For many of us NT is interesting not just because it leads to the singularity but because it comments on changes taking place today, dominated as they are by the implications of taking technology into the microscale. For instance, improvements in various technologies seem to have brought us to a tactical environment in which command of the air is decisive and instantly so. If that is not the case now, which it probably is, it will be as soon as counterforce platforms -- robot vehicles that can detect and track enemy fire and then put ordnance at its point of origin -- enter the armory. Either by now or at most when this point is reached, the trends that over the last two centuries have made civilians and civilian society the central objective of war, either to defend or destroy, will reverse themselves. Since Napoleon wars have been about logistics and mobilization. In this kind of combat big guys always won. This changes once a nation has total command of the air, since in that context very small investments in material suddenly go very far indeed, leveraged as they are by the advantages in surveillance and transport that accrue to advanced aero technologies. In such an environment a small nation, all- knowing and therefore omnipotent, might easily control a large one. Once you get the other guy on his back he will not be able to get up, no matter how big or small he is. One theory of how the next Gulf War will go is that the regime will melt the instant a convincing demonstration of the desire to exercise the advantages of air is made. If that is the way things go, it will show the Iraqis understand something about the nature of contemporary war that our generals do not. at least not quite yet. The centrality of civilians to war and warmaking will be replaced by R&D. The prime directive of national security will be making sure that nobody develops an air command technology that is faster, smarter, and more sensitive than your own, because if that technology is good enough, Lichenstein will be able to rule the world. In short, in warfare air power acts like a toy version of NT. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.