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Sci-fi Writers Join War on Terror
yoyoq writes "Homeland Security is looking for suggestions from sci-fi writers. "Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described "deviant" thinkers: science-fiction writers."
Here's a suggestion: 9-11 could have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door."
Ha!
Leaving aside the Terminator suggestion, the SF writer involvement in suggesting government policy isn't actually quite as crazy (or as unprecedented) as it sounds.
One of the requirements for this group is that the individual has to have a PhD in a technical area (physics, engineering, etc.). These aren't just random writers off the street.
As TFA notes, the 9/11 commission said the attacks were a result, in part, of the government's "failure of imagination". SF writers, unlike some beltway bureaucrats and politicians, aren't lacking in that, at least.
As for precedent, both Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven (coauthors of Footfall, and the Mote in God's Eye amongst other works) were a significant part of the push in the 80's to develop what is now National Missile Defense.
(Of course, that may or may not be a good program, but it's certainly an example of educated SF writers influencing public policy).
Holmwood
If the door was locked, how long would it take for the pilot to open the door if the terrorist started executing one passanger a minute until the door was opened?
On the flip side, how many of those executions would it take before the passengers turned *all* the flights into flight 93?
Then it's just a race to see whether the passengers react or the pilot caves first. My suggestion: with the terrorists with knives instead of guns, the passengers.
Actually, here's a better question: How many americans were killed in terrorist attacks in the year _before_ 9/11? Exactly zero.
Saying "we haven't had other attacks since then" just begs for the "see? so our paranoid security works!" answer. The fact is, there weren't that many before either. Sure, 9/11 was most unfortunate, but it was by and large a one time event.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Didn't one airline (may have been Israeli) suggest that they actually build a bulkhead between the cockpit and the passenger compartment? The pilot/copilot would then have their own external door to enter/exit the plane. They theorised that hijackings would reduce, because there's no way of moving from the passenger area to the cockpit whilst the plane is in flight without structurally damaging the airframe. Seems a good, if expensive, idea to me...
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
Depending on your interpretation of history, it could be argued that this was one of the things that let to the collapse of the Soviet Union as they couldn't compete with the proposed SDI technologies.
Yeah, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that locks on the doors on 9/11 could have been useful, but really some blue sky thinking will do no harm.
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Why go that far? Car accidents? Household accidents? So far, I don't see people avoiding cars like the plague and envy homeless people for their safe lifestyle.
But it gets better. The craze went over to countries that haven't EVER been the target for any kind of organised terrorism whatsoever (aside of domestic terrorism, when some nut decided it's fun to blow up a few pipes). How the heck can you explain that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In fact, having flown many times, I actually am concerned about the lack of time many airports spend on security. I was coming back from Tokyo in the San Francisco and due to a malfunction in the baggage return I was delayed 45 minutes on a connecting flight that was only 1:10 after I landed. I was sure that there was no way I could get my bags and get to the connecting gate, in the domestic terminal, in time.
Fortunately for me, customs waved me through without so much as wanding me. Unfortunately, that isn't what customs is supposed to do. I should have missed that flight.
FanFictionRecs.net
I am British and niether racist nor a coward.
We brits have no need to attract terrorists are we are self sufficient in this area
although we don't export that many.
As for the goods thing we do, well, its much the same as your list:-
Invade Afganistan.
Invade Iraq.
Murdoch dominated media.
etc. etc.
Plus a few extras like:-
Inflicting cricket on half the world (technically only the English are culpable for this).
We dont have a national dress anymore as all the world is stuffed into suits and ties -- this surely counts as the most pervasive and uncofrotable example of "cultural imperialism" ever.
The Spice Girls (we are truly sorry about Posh Spice - but very glad she is now living in LA).
etc. etc.
On the other hand:
We nearly always apologetic about invading someones country, sinking thier fleet, bombing thier cities etc. etc.
We accept that foriegners and ex-colonists are inferior so are carefull not to criticise them.
We try to be polite and orderly when in someone elses country (when sober!).
We only pick fights with with people who want to fight and/or the riot police (when drunk!).
In this way we are nearly always welcome back, and, have have the world lining up to take up residense
in our damp miserabl eover priced country.
Go figure.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
As an "America-hating Furriner" I'd like to say that I agree with your sentiment. The problem is that the people you describe already stay in their own country, from whence they make their crappy, far reaching decisions. Americans who choose to travel are the open minded, educated, polite ones who know there's actually something worth seeing outside the states.
.evom ton seod gis eht
AFAIK, Larry Niven doesn't actually have a PhD in a technical area. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. I believe that Washburn eventually got round to awarding him an honorary doctorate in Letters, but the point stands that had the 80s group worked according to the rules given for this particular group, he would presumably have been rejected as a random writer off the street.
Maybe the PhD isn't the best identifying mark of a fertile imagination...
You know, I used to work in a building directly across West Street from the WTC. Two people from the floor below mine were trapped in an elevator and killed as the building was consumed by fire. And contrary to what you'd apparently expect, I agree with your parent post, and what's more so do most of my friends and colleagues, and probably most people in my city.
So next time you presume to speak for those affected by terrorism, how about you shut your fucking trap? Or at least tone it down with the hysteria. Most of my city wanted Bush out of office in 2004 because we understand his policies are making us less safe; if you ask me in a less guarded moment, I'm apt to say I think flyover country, in that election, aided the terrorists by ignoring our very real security concerns and reelecting a global menace.
By the way, I hear my old office building's been turned into a high-end condo development. Lesson being that life goes on; the world hasn't turned on end; what was sensible before 9/11 is sensible still, particularly OP's suggestion of helping to ensure peace and stability at home by doing less to make people around the world feel insecure.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
Let us now think about those executions of passengers. We may not prevent them, but we can reduce the casualties. Assume that there are approx. 6 bad guys armed with improvised cold weapons, therefore effective attack range of each member is cca 1 meter. What are tactical options of passengers?
As long as the cockpit is not penetrated, the pilots may help with another effective countermeasures (but they would require a tactically skilled flight attendant coordinating the actions, or some kind of CCTV in the cabin):
In this mental exercise are some assumptions as well. The foremost is that only cold weapons are available to terrorists. Here we have to rely on the integrity and skill of airport personnel, but even with handguns I believe passengers with improvised shields would stand a chance. When it comes to bombs, well, bad luck, BUT: the bad guys can destroy the plane, but they will not control it.
Heh, a similar thing happens in Niven and Pournelle's book Footfall. Earth is invaded by aliens and the US government calls in the sci-fi writers.
For example, the idea of a commercial plane crashing into a building (the whitehouse) was in Tom Clancey's "Red Storm Rising" published in 1991.
Sadly when asked about 9/11, our government officials said that it never occured to anyone that a commercial plane would be used as a weapon.
As for precedent, both Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote actual scenes into some of their books (including Footfall), where the hapless government rounded up a bunch of balding geek-a-zoid sci-fi writers as non-traditional "technical experts" to help strategy and intel efforts against an unusual threat.
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Sure, and what happens the first time something goes wrong and the plane crew is incapacitated? Prior to 9/11, it was a far greater worry that the cockpit door would be locked when something went wrong than the idea of someone storming the cockpit with boxcutters.
In hindsight, we also should have trained pilots not to so easily relinquish control of the plane. Instead it was generally thought that hijackers should be allowed to take over the plane because they normally just landed somewhere and made demands.
Experience had taught us to expect completely different circumstances than we had on 9/11.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Personally, much of my solution to the problem involves a shift in our teaching process. For years we've taught 'let the professionals handle it'. IE the police.
Even the police had been infected with this - during Columbine they secured a perimeter and waited for SWAT. This cost lives. Now standard procedure for many departments is that police go in when they get there. Officer Dan might not be SWAT, but he has a gun he should be competent with, and he's what's there, not what's going to take another 15 minutes(and possibly another 60 dead).
We saw the ultimate failure at Viginia Tech - Students hid under desks and tried to flee - from a single assailant. Far fewer lives would have been lost if they'd done the same thing flight 93 had done - attacked back.
I think that a cultural change to one of resistance, one that venerates the 'one who stood first' would be a good thing, in many ways.
I believe there's a lot of truth to the saying: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
As for using scifi authers, I figure it's brainstorming, and a scifi author is generally both inventive and cheap. I can think of far worse things to spend ~30k on.
I don't read AC A human right
Armed citizens cant be oppressed. Why do you think they want to ban guns everywhere and the propoganda that is all over how guns will kill your children and are unsafe?
If you are armed, it makes it harder to declare martial law. Also a generation of unarmed citizens are far more easy to control as the children never had exposure to guns and therefore are frightened of them and have a higher likeliness to not pick one up to defend themselves.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Don't get me wrong, I liked The Mote In God's Eye, but I wish he'd write more SF and less political analysis.
That trend makes me uncomfortable with the recent directive that Bush issued on May 9 signed that grants near dictatorial powers to the office of the president in the event of a national emergency declared by the president. I am surprised that directive has not yet received much discussion in the press or by Congress.
National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive NSPD-51 and HSPD-20
LOL and I am an American...
It is even funnier because of the trip last summer.
The family went to Canada for vacation. So we are up in the Quebec area and standing in line at a restaurant and the people in front of us are speaking French. My brother then says, loud enough for them to here, "They should speak the language before they come to this country." (Add a southern accent. We are from the south.)
I slapped him up side the head and said "You are in there country, now apologize to them in French!"
He just turned red and walked away. I then, in French, asked them to excuse l'idiot and apologized for his behavior. My French is bad but they understood and responded in English.
I will never forget it! I can only hope that it sticks in his mind and he NEVER does it again.
I've met a few members of the GIGN team that assaulted the plane, so I'm well aware of the circumstances. None believed at the time that the GIA intended to die in a mass suicide. Much of the reasoning that 8969 was a suicide mission is from the fact that one of their main demands was for a fully fueled plane. Post 9/11, many outsiders have reinterpreted that it was so that they could crash the plane in Paris, yet at the time everyone believed that it was so that the plane could fly to Beirut to make good their escape. Another difference between 9/11 & 8969 (bringing the thread back to the original point) is that on 8969, the terrorists boarded before the flight took off when the cabin was open and had firearms. Placing locks on the cabin doors could not have helped on 8969 so there was no pressure to do so after it's resolution.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Really?
How much would it cost to eradicate poverty?
How much would it cost to feed and give health care to every human being that is starving? To educate every child? To nurture healthy economies where there are none or where corrupt governments ruined it?
Compare that with the cost of one week of Iraq occupation. How much money is being wasted in a war that gives nothing in return but a general feeling Americans are evil?
My grand mother went to tears every time she told me the story of how American troops shared their supplies with local refugees in the devastated Europe towards the end of the war. She never mentioned the government, invasions, nazis, politics or the reasons for the war - she remembered how generous they in helping her and her husband (along with hundreds of refugees) to feed their children in times of extreme hardship.
This is a good way to win lifetime loyalty - to help people. Not to bomb them back into stone-age and then invade, overthrow a bad and corrupt government for no better reason than to outdo a former president who couldn't (or didn't really want to) get rid of him and then push the country in the chaos of a virtual civil war and pave the way to a theocracy. Not to endorse corrupt and blood-thirsty dictators just because they oppose anyone to the left of the most far right extremists.
I do not blame people for the actions of their government, but not everyone is as enlightened. You can't expect to be popular, or safe, with a foreign policy like this.
And you don't need a sci-fi writer to figure that out.
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First, it's SF, or science fiction, not sci-fi. "Sci-fi" was coined by movie reviewers in the '50's to sound cool. No one in science fiction used the term.
Now. I used the term "real world" from Asimov and Greenberg's "Best of [fill in year]" SF short story collections. Asimov's opening essay would sum up what was happening in the world, that Mel Brooks was Melvin Kaminski still. Then he would list what was happening in the Real World of science fiction that year.
We, the children of Asimov, the Real World of SF, respondeth:
In 2007, fearmongers were still pumping the handle on the "terrorist" shibboleth. No one had attacked the US in over six years, yet the citizenry was still being told that an attack was imminent, could come from anywhere (yet still somehow was related to planes), and that the enemy was Islam, though that meme was heavily cloaked in buzz words. Homeland Security, named seemingly by George Orwell himself, was rolling up the country's police and intelligence forces into one incoherent and unmanageable mess. The rightist militias, one member of which had actually blown up a federal building in Oklahoma City, were still marching and conducting drills to take down the government, yet were curiously untouched by the new American police force. We were still attempting to occupy a country that we had been assured was about to attack us at any moment, and we were losing.
Mel Brooks was Mel Brooks.
In the real world, the collected writers of science fiction, addressed as "sci-fi" writers, were asked to come up with ideas to block the immiment attacks against our helpless country. Jerry Pournelle probably leapt to the the defense, while the others in more or less said: There are no terrorists, and there is no such enemy as terrorism. If you are trying to find a way to fend off attacks, first, you cannot. The preeminent architects of the future, we scruffy bunch, will tell you there is no way to prevent an intelligent attacker from finding a way to hurt you, if he or she is willing to die to strike a blow. We spend our lives imagining ways to do the impossible. Yes, in five minutes we can give you a dozen ways around any security protocol you can come up with. If you block those, we will find another dozen. The same attacks can be achieved in any place that is not a military prison. If you wish perfect safety, make your nation into such. And you still will be afraid, for it is not a matter of security, but of perception of security. You grow fear in your people like mold, and you devour that mold as your sustenance. You are making yourselves an army of George Hearsts through selling fear and the antidote for the fear, so assuaging the fear is increasingly out of the question, is it not?
Try instead not to manufacture enemies. You created bin Laden to strike at the Soviets in Afghanistan in the seventies, who claimed they were there to stem the rise of militant Islam. They were right and you were wrong. You invaded Afghanistan to strike at al Queda, even though they left long before you bombed the country. You annihilated Iraq, then turned it into a occupied prison state. You are now surrounding Iran with two carrier groups and tried to add a third, but the Navy refused to cooperate. If you bomb them, 90 million people will take up arms against you, and yes, all the attacks you tell your people to fear will then become very real. Mission Accompished, indeed.
We can't help you. You are your own enemy, and you will never defeat yourself. Try shattering the mirror.
Many progressives wanted the Bush Administration to capture and try Osama bin Laden for the crimes he committed. The Bush Administration, after 9/11, and after Tora Bora, said that getting bin Laden wasn't that important. Yes, bin Laden is what you say he is. Yes, the Bush Administration didn't care.
That he wasn't a serious threat any more. And then the Bush Administration started the war they wanted to fight, and kicked off events that have killed half a million Iraqis. That's pretty scumfuckerisious.
Hhehe.
Aye, vote for Obama bin ladin.... such are the typos that make baby jesus cry.
So... obviously, i meant Osama bin Ladin. And lots of other rich, powerful people who stir up crap and get people killed because they enjoy it, it gives purpose to their life.
People can be poor and very happy. People can be rich and miserable. People who are really not that bad off can be stirred up to think things are horrible by the powers that be.
The fact is that if most of the middle east would just let go of the jewish issue and stop attacking them, they would outbreed isreal out of existence in 20 to 50 years. But no.. they have to keep stirring up crap and killing teenagers because of something that happened 60 YEARS ago (three generations). It's over-- let it go and move on.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.