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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."
Here's a suggestion: 9-11 could have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door.
Everyone's a snide little clever genius after the fact.
Here's a suggestion: no, it could not have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door. It would have likely been a somewhat different attack, but it still would have happened.
Meanwhile, people still catch colds despite having a supply of tissue in the house.
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
Here's an idea, why not stop wasting time on this sort of, headline grabbing, nonsense and sort out the existing agencies who are supposed to be responsible for this sort of thing so they can gain some actual intelligence about what the terrorists are actually planning and actually do something to stop that.
If Homeland Security really are trying to think of more innovative solutions they might consider putting a stop to some of the activities the US is or has been involved in which tend to increase the number of available terrorists wanting to attack it. This might involve stopping the CIA kidnapping people and taking them off to be tortured, stop starting pointless wars and stop interfering in other countries in order to install regimes that suit your own purposes.
They should get a science fiction writer to create a religion to create an alternative to Islam. Oh.
Our sense of risk is so badly out of whack that we're just being ridiculous--it isn't even hysteria anymore, not after this many years. We're being suckered by a sensationalistic media working in cohorts with government, which always, always wants more power. I'd say it was shocking if I could even muster any surprize at how stupid we're being over this.
Lemme see...
- train your stormtroopers so they can hit a man sized target at 100 ft distance
- don't have your war droids depend on a centralized node that, when destroyed, would disable the whole army
- make sure there are no vents leading directly to your death star's reactor, no matter how hard or unlikely to hit they are
- fun as it may be, and sure as you may be that he's a complete bastard, don't send a father to torture his daughter and duel his son. They might end up working together against you. Also, if you've decided to replace him with his son, don't tell it to his face.
- don't make yourself hated by whole populations in the first place. Destroying whole planets just to show you can, is actually pretty bad PR. It's bad for your tax income too. Noone will rise in rebellion or send suicide bombers against you for just treating them right and creating employment.
- make sure the doors, especially prison doors or doors to critical command rooms, can't be opened by shooting the control panel. And generally, security means everything should fail in the way that is the least of a security problem. Losing electricity should cause the door bolts to lock the door (e.g., they're on springs that push them to the locked state, and you need current to pull them open), not unlock it.
- for that matter, and according to the same principle, a damaged reactor should tend to shut down, not blow up. There's a reason 20'th century nuclear reactors need current to keep the moderator rods out, and get to shut down if they lose that current
- control consoles don't have much of a reason to explode when the ship takes a hit in some point half a mile away. You may need that console again, and trained specialist officers that operate them are expensive to replace too
- invest in some shielding technology, or at least armour. The Mitsubishi A6M Zero fared poorer than you'd think with only speed and maneuverability as its only defenses, and got shot by airplanes which could take a whole clip and keep flying. The TIE fighter is just repeating an existing mistake. Don't do it.
And generally, read the evil overlord's list already.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This group is a professinal think tank, those in the picture all look over 55, and to be a member you need a technical doctorate degree. How much of a "deviant" thinker or "rebel" can they really be? Aren't people that come up with the most inventive and "crazy" ideas a bit younger? I like the idea of employing think tanks, it shows initiative which is vital, but if they really want some results I think they're going to have to attract a different set of thinkers.
They might as well just post the discussion here.
Here's my list:
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
How about a sane foreign policy? Like cockpit locks, it won't prevent all terrorist attacks, but less bullying and more actual diplomacy will help. It also wouldn't hurt to examine economic policies and disproportionate consumption of resources. America is a colonial power by fiat and as long as that is so, there will continue to be terrorists.
The sci-fi angle is just silliness, in my opinion.
People are totally innumerate and they overreact to rare, dramatic events. Everyone went nuts over the VT tragedy because it was "the worst school shooting in history" even though it only killed 30+ people. That's less than an average day's worth of gun deaths, or about six hours of car accidents. Now it's almost six years later and people are still overreacting to 9/11. I mean, 3000 deaths in one day and at the same place is impressive, but it still totals to just one month of car accidents. Think of how miserable we've made ourselves since then. Was it worth it?
Asking "whether the next 9/11 can be prevented" is a dumb question to try to answer. It's like "how do we prevent the next car accident?" The sort of questions we should be asking sound cold and calculating, which is unfortunate because it keeps us from asking them:
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks?
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks to zero?
- What is the probability per year that a terrorist act might affect you?
- What is the probability per year that our self-flagellating counterterrorism efforts might affect you?
- Since 9/11, how many additional hours of your life have been spent in airports?
- How many years of your life have been spent as a soldier overseas?
- How many years of your life have been lost as a soldier overseas?
- Is terrorism even something most of us worry about personally anymore?
It's unfortunate that we have created security monsters like TSA that simultaneously don't work and would be political suicide to get rid of.
My own idea for "preventing the next VT tragedy" was to crack down on the manufacturers of doors, not the sellers of handguns. If it were illegal to manufacture doors with closed loops in their handles, the guy wouldn't have been able to chain the door shut.
Yes, but it's a lot easier to declare war on a concept that (more or less by definition) you can't beat by shooting at than it is to solve world hunger and abolish inequality over the entire planet.
Or, to put it another way (for those who still think the US is doing well in Iraq): Think of terrorism like a vicious, unpredictable animal that wants to attack you. That's easy enough. But there's a twist: it gets stronger every time you shoot at it, bomb it or do anything violent towards it. Why are you still shooting at it?
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.
I think that comment very often gets taken out of context in order to justify exotic anti-terrorism schemes. It wasn't a "failure of imagination" in the sense that nobody in their wildest dreams thought that it could happen. I mean, let's face it, there's nothing far fetched about smuggling weapons onto a plane. That's why they have metal detectors at the gates. There's nothing far fetched about hijacking a plane. That's happened dozens, if not hundreds of times, in the past 30-40 years. There's nothing far-fetched about suicide bombers. They blow themselves up on a daily basis in the middle east. There's nothing far fetched about attacking the WTC. That had already happened once. The only "failure in imagination" is the failure to believe that terrorists would combine their most effective and well-known tactics into a single act.
But the worst part is that the "failure of imagination" wasn't the reason that 9/11 happened. It was the failure to prevent people from smuggling weapons onto planes and hijacking them that allowed 9/11 to happen, and those are threats that have been around for a very long time.
It's like Bruce Schneier has said many times, if you're spending time and effort in trying to prevent hollywood movie-style terrorist attacks instead of the routine, more effective (and much more likely) types of attacks, then you're probably wasting your time and resources. We're far more likely to end up with car bombs blowing up bridges or suicide bombers blowing themselves up at shopping malls than we are to end up with some exotic antrhax-infected mutant sharks with laserbeams. Hell, a handful of Beslan-style school attacks executed simultaneously across the US would probably have as big of an impact as 9/11 (look what happened with the relatively minor Virginia Tech incident), and it would probably be easier to implement too.
"...But there's a twist: it gets stronger every time you shoot at it, bomb it or do anything violent towards it. Why are you still shooting at it?..."
Very simple! Our jobs depend on there being a vicious animal that wants to attack us. This was fine during the 60s, 70s and 80s, and we had good job prospects. We got lots of established government funds.
Then, in the 90s, our vicious animal suddenly died on us. We were stuck. We weren't just going to quietly retire. We tried to invent drug barons, organised crime, and minor foreign countries as a new vicious animal, but it wasn't the same.
Now we have Islam! If we had been clever, we could have encouraged this ourselves, and paid Osama to crash those planes. We probably didn't, not because we wouldn't, but because we didn't have the foresight. But now it's happened, we're back in clover.
And we're damn well not going to mess this one up. It's going to last a long time, just like the Russian animal. Have you noticed how we insist that speeches are made stressing that this willl be a 'long haul'? Too right. We're not stupid. Everyone told us that invading Iraq would make things worse. Why do you think we did it?
Well, this is certainly a good brute-force approach. The problem, of course, is that there are a lot of vulnerable places. Schools, shopping malls, stadia, airplanes, hospitals, large buildings, bridges, factories, food processing plants, ports, power plants, electrical grid, network control centers... and the list goes on. So that means millions of guards. Possibly tens of millions. Assuming you're actually going to protect vulnerable places with well-trained guards. In a modern technological densely-populated society, that's a lot of places to protect.
Now if you want well-trained, highly competent guards, you're going to have to pay them more than the typical rent-a-cop rates. That'll be expensive. You'll have to arm them (with at least non-lethal weapons).
Let's say you only need 2.5 million guards in North America. (well under 1% of the population). Of course, they only work 40 hours a week, so you're looking at just over 4 shifts. OK, 10 million guards. Well-trained, highly competent, so you'll probably have salaries of around 50k, and support infrastructure and overhead that doubles that. 100k/year. That's a trillion dollars a year.
Is that really the best way to improve security? I can think of a lot of ways other than spending a trillion dollars on 'well trained guards in [all] vulnerable places'.
And you'll have something much closer to a police state -- either they'll be government guards or corporate guards.
And if you miss just one vulnerable place, then the approach fails. No, I'd rather apply intellect and thought to the problem rather than try and brute force it. I'm not sure the SF writers are the way to go, but I think it's a lot better than going the police state road and spending a trillion a year for the privilege.
-Holmwood
On one hand, I really don't know if it's a good idea for politicians to read books at all, let alone speak to writers. Here in the UK someone misread 1984 and took it to be a guide book promoting the merits of the police state, complete with instructions.
On the the other hand though, if the writers really pushed the boat out and highlighted the - ever so real - danger of space based terrorism, who knows, NASA may get funding to build decent spacecraft (maybe even a Star Destroyer). Wouldn't want one of them little rascals redirecting an asteroid to hit N.Y. now would we?
I'm not a Sci-fi writer but here is what I suggest:
Hello! We are not in a movie or a video game. We live in The Real World. People realy die, people realy suffer. We can't just rewind the movie or restart the game.
If you don't want someone to hurt you, don't be his enemy.
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