Three years ago, I released a video on youtube which told of a monumental threat that civilisation would someday have to confront. This threat is a series of man made and environmental disasters which will overlap and amplify into something resembling a great filter. I was supposed to have followed up this warning with a full length video, but was unable to do so due to a serious illness. Before I knew it, 2011 rolled into 2012, then 2012 rolled into 2013, etc. The mistake I made was assuming that men more educated than myself would be able to connect the dots, create a hypothesis, and get it out to the public. Suffice to say, that didn't happen. It is now my challenge to try and explicate the complex nature of this crisis, at a time when global warming has totally ensnared the worlds attention economy. Please bare with me!
Now, exactly what is the convergence? It is a collusion of more than a dozen existential threats which not
only exist, and continue to worsen, but will peak in intensity sometime
in the 2030s. Their relative dangers and receptivity to change varys.
Some of the threats have quite minor effects, but are hard to fix, and
dangerous because they exacerbate and amplify the other threats (like
how overpopulation forces us to find more sources of energy and food, or how pollution ruins arable land and makes it harder to create that extra food, etc). Other threats would have devastating effects if left to build up, but can be quite
easily fixed before they reach critical mass. Each of these tendrils acts as a stress point in the foundations of our global society: A fissure in one can quickly spread to others, leading to an unpredictable domino sequence.
In this article, I will content myself simply with naming the specific threats, and describing the backgrounds of the more nefarious ones. It would also be useful to have a simple typology through which we can classify their nature. For now, this can take the form of three categorys. #1 will determine the disasters potential for collateral damage. #2 will determine whether or not countermeasures are practical against it. #3 will determine whether or not the threat is an adjuvant (I.E, if it negatively affects the other disasters). What I will not do is attempt to offer a comprehensive solution to these looming disasters. Because the connections and interplay between these threats are not well understood, I would also caution anyone who thinks they can enact treatments in isolation: That would be like trying to stop a volcanic eruption by plugging up the holes to the surface!
Global warming
According to the EPA, average global temperatures are expected to increase by 2 to 11.5 degrees fahrenheit by the year 2100. Depending on how high the temperature ceiling is, this would aggravate storm systems, raise sea levels, and damage ecosystems. Government agencys allege that this will happen because of the sheer quantity of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere by gasoline and diesel engines, and that the only way to prevent this is through a carbon tax. While scholars like david m.w evans have managed to punch holes in their climate model, and prove that it is inconsistent with data collected by the ARGO system, that only serves to debunk some of the more hysterical claims put forward by the global warming alarmists: This includes the belief that the earths climate system has already passed an insurmountable tipping point, or that the rate of warning is happening faster than at any point in earths history.
There are other problems with the AGW narrative, at least with regards to how it will be solved. According to ryan dawson: 'The carbon tax and the climate controls and security bill, regardless of
what you think about global warming, doesn't do a thing to prevent it.
All it does is divide up greenhouse gases into allotments which can be
traded and sold and even invested in by third parties, just creates a
market environment which lets the larger government subsidized
agrobusinesses to gobble up allotments from the smaller farms and
ranches and create tighter virtual monopolies. It also put control of
industry into the hands of a small group of government hacks and
threatens property rights all under the guise of being green. The only
kind of green here is envy and money.' Carbon taxes are the wrong answer to this problem. We should pay more attention to bjorn lomborg and his studys on marine cloud whitening, which could mitigate global warming for a relatively small price tag.
Depletion of arable land
Peak water
The misandry bubble
According to one theory, feminism (which had its roots in the 'free love' movement of the 60s) is a social virus which destroys the marriage system. Nuclear familys are formed by beta males and their women, who enter into marriage chaste. It is a very stable unit which caters to the needs of the man, the woman, and their children. All advanced, patriarchal societys depend upon the nuclear family: Since they all work together to support the man, the man can devote his full effort to the job. This high productivity is what has allowed the west to outcompete all other cultures, and the marriage system itself is airtight. The only vulnerable link is the young woman herself, often before she becomes sexually active. Girls are told that its okay to delay marriage and engage in casual sex, and that this will not have a negative imapct for them in the future. Television paints an unrealistic ideal for them to emulate, and sure enough... Women get stuck in the lifestyle of sleeping with men whose only lot in life is seduction.
These men only comprise a small portion of the population, which gives them nearly unlimited options: They can pick any woman they want, and treat them however they want, with scarce few consequences. As a result, women spend years and years chasing men who are out of their league and have no intention of making a commitment, while they pass up relationships with men in their own social groups. But a womans beauty has a brief shelf life, and by the time of her 30th to 35th birthday, she will find herself kicked off the carousel by the alphas. Even the betas will not desire her as much, since men instinctively distrust women with high n-counts. This phenomenon destroys the pool of marriageable women, and consequently diminishs the incentive of men to work. With no wives or children to care for, they are able to live a more convenient, spend thrift life. Of course, this has the consequence of slowing down economic productivity, which is a death sentence to patriarchal societys.
Ozone pollution
Ocean acidification
The energy crisis
Global
supplys of fossil fuels are dwindling at a rapid rate. If consumption
patterns continue as they have indefinitely, there will only be enough
oil reserves will last for 40 to 50 years, while gas reserves will be
depleted in 70 years, and coal will disappear in about 200 years. Of
course, these are just the official figures... One must remember that
this crisis is partly artificial, since the US government not only
supresses alternative energy sources, but has also concealed the existence of massive oil fields like those in prudhoe bay, alaska.
Military defense death spiral
The singularity
Demographic crisis
This also ties in with feminism to a certain extent. With most children now being born out of wedlock to single mothers (many of them the product of miscegenation), the indigenous populations of north america and europe are being culturally and genetically weakened. Without the benefit of growing up in a nuclear family, they will be unable to compete at home and abroad with the 3rd world, leaving them vulnerable to a takeover by baby boom. Within a generation from now, formerly strong western nations will have devolved into balkanised hellholes with low productivity.
Economic collapse
Natural disasters
One thing that should be obvious by now is how most of the threats are of very different backgrounds, and have ambiguous taxonomys (kindof like the seven deadly sins). Take natural disasters, for example. No one would consider everyday occurrences like volcanism,
earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and solar storms to be an existential
threat in an of themselves. But if their magnitude could be amplified by things like global warming? And if they were to be assigned under a
single category? Then they would definitely make the cut. Now that I have assembled something resembling a hypothesis, it is up to you the public to digest and critique. Comments of all kind are welcome. If you think there were any threats I marginalised, exaggerated, or forgot to even include, now is your time to speak.
Friday, 10 October 2014
Sunday, 7 September 2014
Physiology of a super soldier
What will soldiers in the next few decades look like, when the world has run out of oil and is fighting over coal and gas? For once, lets forget about equipment and weapons, and ponder on the men themselves. We know that in many combat units a pareto principle is in play, whereby a handful of veteran 'aces' score the majority of the kills. It is no small problem that in a violent confrontation, most soldiers behave in a passive manner. On average, a 100 man company may have 80 men who are little more than 'an ammunition porter for the main weapons and a rear/flank security man.' Implementing stricter entry requirements and harsher training can only partially alter this ratio: After all, militarys have a manpower quota that must be met even in an era that is awash with gory war movies and memoirs.
Another concern is whether or not baseline humans will be able to even participate in late 21st century conflicts. Judging from the mind numbing power of modern weaponry, this seems dubious. Over the past decades, military machines have become more and more capable, but the same cannot be said for the humans who use them. Those military theorists who have acknowledged the problems posed by a lethal, high tempo battlefield will often propose the adoption of powered exoskeletons. But even if armys could afford to give every infantryman such expensive equipment, it wouldn't provide the most bang for their buck. As we shall see, that distinction belongs to a class of humans bred to fight and die on their nations behalf. Soldiers who will rely not on articulated suits of armor, but a physiology geared towards the harsh demands of warfare. This approach is heavily dependent upon gene therapy and eugenics.
The concept of a super soldier is certainly not new. Greek mythology was rich with storys about orion, achilles, and hercules. Demi-gods who lived among humans yet possessed incredible strength, speed, and durability. Many cultures that came into contact with the greeks would subsequently adopt heros with such attributes, something to serve both as inspiration and instruction for young men going to war. Armed conflict has always been a tough business with more losers than winners [1], but this trend has become even more pronounced since the industrial revolution. So what abilitys does the mainstream press have in mind when it comes to super soldiers? Here is one headline: 'Tomorrow's soldiers could be able to run at Olympic speeds and will be able to go for days without food or sleep, if new research into gene manipulation is successful. According to the U.S. Army's plans for the future, their soldiers will be able to carry huge weights, live off their fat stores for extended periods and even regrow limbs blown apart by bombs.' These are all good starting points, but are they really going to be sufficient in a peer vs peer conflict? Normal humans may not be able to keep up with the pace determined by their machines, forcing militarys to work under their capacitys. If this turns out to be the case, then we may need to envision a completely different kind of soldier.
For instance, gunshot wounds are an all encompassing problem that can currently only be addressed through body armor and medical care. No one has devised a biological system which would allow a soldier to take a handgun or rifle round to the torso, and have a very good chance of surviving. Is such a thing achievable or desirable? Steering committees would be needed to determine what adaptations are suitable for a future soldier, and what kind of procedures could be used to attain them. Gene therapy comes in two different forms, somatic and germline. 'Somatic cells, such as skin or muscle cells, contain 23 chromosomal pairs and do not transmit genetic information to succeeding generations. Germline cells, which are the sperm and ova cells, contain 23 unpaired chromosomes and provide genetic information to offspring, as well as to the future generations descended from those offspring.' Military theorists are under the impression that we can rely on one-off somatic alterations to create super soldiers on demand, with no long-term ramifications. They have not considered the very real possibility that some of the adaptations required may be too extreme for a mature adults body to cope with. If so, then we're not looking at a genome army, but something more akin to the saiyans: A warrior race who will need to be socially and reproductively isolated from the native population.
They would be born in a government facility, raised as government operatives, and may pledge allegiance to a nation that abhors their very existence. Upon reaching retirement age, these soldiers will not simply disappear: They will require large living spaces where they can settle down and procreate, so that a new generation (their children) may replace them. And what of the powers and abilitys wielded by this sub-species of human? It is known that the ancestors of modern homo sapiens originally had physical strength on par with other members of the great ape family. How strong is that? Comparative studys on chimpanzees indicate they could lift four times their own body weight overhead. Thats equivalent to a 200 lbs man military pressing 800 lbs! But at some point in time, hominids had reached an evolutionary crossroads where high intelligence and manual dexterity became increasingly more relevant for their survival. Consequentially, muscular strength eroded over hundreds of thousands of years to its current low, as detailed in numerous articles. [2] This fact obviates the need to devise exotic methods of performance enhancement: In practise, an individual will simply be restoring the strength and speed that were native to their most distant forebears. Through the use germline engineering and in-vitro fertilisation, we may see humans returned to their former physical glory.
Operational
The couples who agree to have their (unborn) children genetically enhanced to serve in the army should ideally be military veterans themselves, to ensure that they have the long term commitment required for the project to work. Once several thousand couples have been assembled, they would each need to donate sperm and ova samples to a lab, and sign a contract allowing geneticists to insert micro-chromosomes into them. Embryos with the altered genomes would then need to have their gender pre-determined as male or female, to ensure that a breeding population of metahumans can flourish: Too few females will limit the sizes of succeeding generations, but too many females will compromise the units fighting strength (presumably, since only males will be allowed to serve in front line roles). The fertilised embryo would then be implanted into the woman, and nine months later she would give birth to a child with unbelievable physical powers.
Th next step in this process is even more interesting. During their early years, the children will be raised by their familys in a communal estate, owned and paid for by the government. They would grow up in an inclusive atmosphere with other metahumans for company, and an absence of extremists who might discriminate against them. From the age of 5 to 14, they will spend their summer months in a military themed camp where they become acquainted with many of the skills that will define their adulthood. At the age of 15, the soldiers were drawn together as a training battalion and shipped out to an actual base, learning to work alongside their peers and co-operate as an actual unit. During this time, they would be under the command of the army reserves. At the age of 18, the soldiers and their battalion were considered operational, and would go into active duty. This is when they were transferred to the regular armys command.
Metahuman soldiers will be organised into so called shock brigades. These are tier three units which are capable of serving many different roles. In high intensity conflicts, they would form the spearhead for corps level attacks and counter-attacks, enduring in conditions that would shatter the morale of ordinary soldiers. They can establish defensive screens that depleted formations or support troops can shelter behind in times of crisis. Their physiology would also make them extremely effective in close quarters fighting so typical of urban combat. In low intensity conflicts, shock brigades can be stripped of their vehicles and heavy weaponry, and sent behind enemy lines on foot to assist special forces units. This was possible because of the soldiers great strength and skill at man packing, enabling them to carry everything they needed with only an occasional air drop to replenish ammunition, food, batterys, and spare parts. Fighting as light infantry, they can pacify environments which are inhospitable to tier two and one units.
Physiology
Muscular system: Metahumans have an archaic musculo-skeletal system granting them enormous physical strength, sufficient to deadlift approximately 2000 lbs, and military press well over 800 lbs. With training, they can do even more. (A normal man can press 110 to 130 lbs, while top power lifters in peak condition can triple this) Most of this performance increase comes down to complex differences in how the muscle fibers are recruited, and a mutation in the MSTN and NCOR1 gene, which regulate muscle mass. They have a vertical jump of 72 inchs, and a standing long jump of 288 inchs. Hand speed and reflexes are also improved. In addition, metahumans have enlarged adrenal glands which are connected to a set of GVA nerve fibers: With training, they can empty its contents in around 2 seconds, giving the body explosive speed at the cost of fine motor skills [3]. The adrenal glands can also be activated in the normal manner, dumping hormones into the blood stream at a slower pace in response to stress.
Dermal and circulatory system: A metahumans skin (particularly the dermis and epidermis layer) is much thicker, making them less susceptible to cuts, burns, bruises, or abrasions. Their major arteries are smaller, more numerous and more disperse, often hidden deep within the flesh for extra protection. This makes them unlikely to bleed to death from slash or stab wounds, and prevents their circulation from being cut off by ropes, chains, or other restraints.
Skeletal system: Arguably the most extensive alteration made to their physiology, the skeleton is coated in a strong organic material which make it more resistant to chipping fractures and other impacts. Osteocytes in the lacunae of the bones are responsible for the breakdown and buildup of calcium. A mutation in the thyroid and osteoblasts would cause the massive absorption of calcium needed... Metahumans have what is termed a cranial ridge, basically a smooth growth of bone along the outside of the skull. The anterior ridge is part of the frontal and maxillary bones: It has an hour glass shape, extending from the top of the forehead to the base of the nose. The posterior ridge is part of the parietal bone: It has a more round profile. Small caliber bullets striking the ridge are stopped outright or deflected, although a hairline fracture will often result. In short, the bone around these regions of the skull are much thicker and devoid of dangerous shot traps.
Their abdominal wall is lined with a carapace composed of yellow fibro-cartilage and red bone marrow. This structure serves two important functions with regards to gunshot wounds. First, because of the dissimilar propertys of these tissues (elasticity, viscosity, density, etc), bullets will experience a phenomenon called impedance mismatch, which prevents the formation of a temporary cavity. Second, even after the bullet penetrates the carapace, it has lost so much energy that it tends to push organs aside instead of crushing them. This arrangement is so effective that most pistol calibers cannot deliver a through and through chest wound to a metahuman. In those instances when organs are damaged enough to begin leaking blood, the carapace performs another remarkable feat: Macrophages in the putty-like marrow are able to quickly break down RBCs and recycle their materials for use elsewhere in the body, which limits the severity of internal bleeding [4]. Although the individual can still die from exsanguination if the wound is severe enough, this is not common, since their blood clots more quickly.
Minor alterations: The brain has a thicker layer of cerobrospinal fluid (a mild form of hydrocephalus), which makes them less susceptible to concussions. Their eyes have a widened fovea, giving them an enhanced field of central vision. They also have highly mobile ears, enabling them to determine the exact location of a sound more quickly. Finally, the length of their metacarpals have been equalised to create a more solid punching surface.
Miscellaneous
One major advantage of the metahuman soldier program is how their genomes can be updated every generation to meet emergent battlefield demands, and take advantage of progress in biotechnology: Unlike homo sapiens, they will never become obsolete. There may be times when steering committees come up with useful adaptations that are too difficult for current technologys to implement. So even though super soldiers then in service wouldn't receive the enhancements, their children and grandchildren very well could!
They are significantly heavier than a human of comparable build, since they have alot more bone and skin. Because of their abdominal carapace, metahumans are visually perceived as overweight. Most body fat is not stored on the hips or stomachs, as that would lead to excessive waistlines (it goes to the forearms and lower leg instead). The average specimen is 5 feet 8-11 inchs tall, weighs 220-250 lbs, with a mesomorphic-endomorph body type.
Metahumans will easily beat humans in short distance sprints, but not anything over 400 meters. Human physiology dictates that a runner's near-top speed cannot be maintained for more than thirty seconds or so as lactic acid builds up and leg muscles begin to be deprived of oxygen. The only long distance races they win at are events where a weighted pack is mandatory (like the army speed marchs).
They would not train in any specific hand to hand combat system, mostly because their natural strength and speed enables them to quickly overwhelm a human opponent. In addition, metahumans are virtually impossible to knock unconscious, and cannot suffer broken noses or jaws. While they may be taught to execute basic strikes, even this is overkill: With homo validus, every punch is a knockout punch.
Metahumans should practise knife survival drills: Even though their abdominal carapace protects them from lethal stab wounds, they are still vulnerable to bio-mechanical cutting which traverses large sections of the body . Many courses which claim to offer such survival skills actually teach something akin to dueling, which is not useful at all. As one source put it: 'Criminal and military history reveals that a real world knife fight is more like football and less like fencing.'
Note
[1] According to an old german adage: 'A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.'
[2] This decline was already evident in our ancestors of 200,000 years ago. Compare the homo sapiens of that time to homo ergaster: The difference in skeletal robustness is obvious.
[3] Experiments showed that adrenaline increases twitch, but not tetanic force, and not rate of force development (which is necessary for fast and high power movements).
[4] Internal bleeding is serious for two reasons: The excess blood can compress organs and cause their dysfunction (as can occur in hematoma). When the bleeding does not stop spontaneously, the loss of blood will cause hemorrhagic shock, which can lead to brain damage and death. If there is pressure, it may lead to death or a brain hemorrhage.
*edit made april 8, 2015
Another concern is whether or not baseline humans will be able to even participate in late 21st century conflicts. Judging from the mind numbing power of modern weaponry, this seems dubious. Over the past decades, military machines have become more and more capable, but the same cannot be said for the humans who use them. Those military theorists who have acknowledged the problems posed by a lethal, high tempo battlefield will often propose the adoption of powered exoskeletons. But even if armys could afford to give every infantryman such expensive equipment, it wouldn't provide the most bang for their buck. As we shall see, that distinction belongs to a class of humans bred to fight and die on their nations behalf. Soldiers who will rely not on articulated suits of armor, but a physiology geared towards the harsh demands of warfare. This approach is heavily dependent upon gene therapy and eugenics.
Say hello to homo validus
For instance, gunshot wounds are an all encompassing problem that can currently only be addressed through body armor and medical care. No one has devised a biological system which would allow a soldier to take a handgun or rifle round to the torso, and have a very good chance of surviving. Is such a thing achievable or desirable? Steering committees would be needed to determine what adaptations are suitable for a future soldier, and what kind of procedures could be used to attain them. Gene therapy comes in two different forms, somatic and germline. 'Somatic cells, such as skin or muscle cells, contain 23 chromosomal pairs and do not transmit genetic information to succeeding generations. Germline cells, which are the sperm and ova cells, contain 23 unpaired chromosomes and provide genetic information to offspring, as well as to the future generations descended from those offspring.' Military theorists are under the impression that we can rely on one-off somatic alterations to create super soldiers on demand, with no long-term ramifications. They have not considered the very real possibility that some of the adaptations required may be too extreme for a mature adults body to cope with. If so, then we're not looking at a genome army, but something more akin to the saiyans: A warrior race who will need to be socially and reproductively isolated from the native population.
They would be born in a government facility, raised as government operatives, and may pledge allegiance to a nation that abhors their very existence. Upon reaching retirement age, these soldiers will not simply disappear: They will require large living spaces where they can settle down and procreate, so that a new generation (their children) may replace them. And what of the powers and abilitys wielded by this sub-species of human? It is known that the ancestors of modern homo sapiens originally had physical strength on par with other members of the great ape family. How strong is that? Comparative studys on chimpanzees indicate they could lift four times their own body weight overhead. Thats equivalent to a 200 lbs man military pressing 800 lbs! But at some point in time, hominids had reached an evolutionary crossroads where high intelligence and manual dexterity became increasingly more relevant for their survival. Consequentially, muscular strength eroded over hundreds of thousands of years to its current low, as detailed in numerous articles. [2] This fact obviates the need to devise exotic methods of performance enhancement: In practise, an individual will simply be restoring the strength and speed that were native to their most distant forebears. Through the use germline engineering and in-vitro fertilisation, we may see humans returned to their former physical glory.
A mastiff from MGR
Operational
The couples who agree to have their (unborn) children genetically enhanced to serve in the army should ideally be military veterans themselves, to ensure that they have the long term commitment required for the project to work. Once several thousand couples have been assembled, they would each need to donate sperm and ova samples to a lab, and sign a contract allowing geneticists to insert micro-chromosomes into them. Embryos with the altered genomes would then need to have their gender pre-determined as male or female, to ensure that a breeding population of metahumans can flourish: Too few females will limit the sizes of succeeding generations, but too many females will compromise the units fighting strength (presumably, since only males will be allowed to serve in front line roles). The fertilised embryo would then be implanted into the woman, and nine months later she would give birth to a child with unbelievable physical powers.
Th next step in this process is even more interesting. During their early years, the children will be raised by their familys in a communal estate, owned and paid for by the government. They would grow up in an inclusive atmosphere with other metahumans for company, and an absence of extremists who might discriminate against them. From the age of 5 to 14, they will spend their summer months in a military themed camp where they become acquainted with many of the skills that will define their adulthood. At the age of 15, the soldiers were drawn together as a training battalion and shipped out to an actual base, learning to work alongside their peers and co-operate as an actual unit. During this time, they would be under the command of the army reserves. At the age of 18, the soldiers and their battalion were considered operational, and would go into active duty. This is when they were transferred to the regular armys command.
Metahuman soldiers will be organised into so called shock brigades. These are tier three units which are capable of serving many different roles. In high intensity conflicts, they would form the spearhead for corps level attacks and counter-attacks, enduring in conditions that would shatter the morale of ordinary soldiers. They can establish defensive screens that depleted formations or support troops can shelter behind in times of crisis. Their physiology would also make them extremely effective in close quarters fighting so typical of urban combat. In low intensity conflicts, shock brigades can be stripped of their vehicles and heavy weaponry, and sent behind enemy lines on foot to assist special forces units. This was possible because of the soldiers great strength and skill at man packing, enabling them to carry everything they needed with only an occasional air drop to replenish ammunition, food, batterys, and spare parts. Fighting as light infantry, they can pacify environments which are inhospitable to tier two and one units.
The abdominal cavity
Physiology
Muscular system: Metahumans have an archaic musculo-skeletal system granting them enormous physical strength, sufficient to deadlift approximately 2000 lbs, and military press well over 800 lbs. With training, they can do even more. (A normal man can press 110 to 130 lbs, while top power lifters in peak condition can triple this) Most of this performance increase comes down to complex differences in how the muscle fibers are recruited, and a mutation in the MSTN and NCOR1 gene, which regulate muscle mass. They have a vertical jump of 72 inchs, and a standing long jump of 288 inchs. Hand speed and reflexes are also improved. In addition, metahumans have enlarged adrenal glands which are connected to a set of GVA nerve fibers: With training, they can empty its contents in around 2 seconds, giving the body explosive speed at the cost of fine motor skills [3]. The adrenal glands can also be activated in the normal manner, dumping hormones into the blood stream at a slower pace in response to stress.
Dermal and circulatory system: A metahumans skin (particularly the dermis and epidermis layer) is much thicker, making them less susceptible to cuts, burns, bruises, or abrasions. Their major arteries are smaller, more numerous and more disperse, often hidden deep within the flesh for extra protection. This makes them unlikely to bleed to death from slash or stab wounds, and prevents their circulation from being cut off by ropes, chains, or other restraints.
Skeletal system: Arguably the most extensive alteration made to their physiology, the skeleton is coated in a strong organic material which make it more resistant to chipping fractures and other impacts. Osteocytes in the lacunae of the bones are responsible for the breakdown and buildup of calcium. A mutation in the thyroid and osteoblasts would cause the massive absorption of calcium needed... Metahumans have what is termed a cranial ridge, basically a smooth growth of bone along the outside of the skull. The anterior ridge is part of the frontal and maxillary bones: It has an hour glass shape, extending from the top of the forehead to the base of the nose. The posterior ridge is part of the parietal bone: It has a more round profile. Small caliber bullets striking the ridge are stopped outright or deflected, although a hairline fracture will often result. In short, the bone around these regions of the skull are much thicker and devoid of dangerous shot traps.
Their abdominal wall is lined with a carapace composed of yellow fibro-cartilage and red bone marrow. This structure serves two important functions with regards to gunshot wounds. First, because of the dissimilar propertys of these tissues (elasticity, viscosity, density, etc), bullets will experience a phenomenon called impedance mismatch, which prevents the formation of a temporary cavity. Second, even after the bullet penetrates the carapace, it has lost so much energy that it tends to push organs aside instead of crushing them. This arrangement is so effective that most pistol calibers cannot deliver a through and through chest wound to a metahuman. In those instances when organs are damaged enough to begin leaking blood, the carapace performs another remarkable feat: Macrophages in the putty-like marrow are able to quickly break down RBCs and recycle their materials for use elsewhere in the body, which limits the severity of internal bleeding [4]. Although the individual can still die from exsanguination if the wound is severe enough, this is not common, since their blood clots more quickly.
Minor alterations: The brain has a thicker layer of cerobrospinal fluid (a mild form of hydrocephalus), which makes them less susceptible to concussions. Their eyes have a widened fovea, giving them an enhanced field of central vision. They also have highly mobile ears, enabling them to determine the exact location of a sound more quickly. Finally, the length of their metacarpals have been equalised to create a more solid punching surface.
Miscellaneous
One major advantage of the metahuman soldier program is how their genomes can be updated every generation to meet emergent battlefield demands, and take advantage of progress in biotechnology: Unlike homo sapiens, they will never become obsolete. There may be times when steering committees come up with useful adaptations that are too difficult for current technologys to implement. So even though super soldiers then in service wouldn't receive the enhancements, their children and grandchildren very well could!
They are significantly heavier than a human of comparable build, since they have alot more bone and skin. Because of their abdominal carapace, metahumans are visually perceived as overweight. Most body fat is not stored on the hips or stomachs, as that would lead to excessive waistlines (it goes to the forearms and lower leg instead). The average specimen is 5 feet 8-11 inchs tall, weighs 220-250 lbs, with a mesomorphic-endomorph body type.
Metahumans will easily beat humans in short distance sprints, but not anything over 400 meters. Human physiology dictates that a runner's near-top speed cannot be maintained for more than thirty seconds or so as lactic acid builds up and leg muscles begin to be deprived of oxygen. The only long distance races they win at are events where a weighted pack is mandatory (like the army speed marchs).
They would not train in any specific hand to hand combat system, mostly because their natural strength and speed enables them to quickly overwhelm a human opponent. In addition, metahumans are virtually impossible to knock unconscious, and cannot suffer broken noses or jaws. While they may be taught to execute basic strikes, even this is overkill: With homo validus, every punch is a knockout punch.
Metahumans should practise knife survival drills: Even though their abdominal carapace protects them from lethal stab wounds, they are still vulnerable to bio-mechanical cutting which traverses large sections of the body . Many courses which claim to offer such survival skills actually teach something akin to dueling, which is not useful at all. As one source put it: 'Criminal and military history reveals that a real world knife fight is more like football and less like fencing.'
Note
[1] According to an old german adage: 'A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.'
[2] This decline was already evident in our ancestors of 200,000 years ago. Compare the homo sapiens of that time to homo ergaster: The difference in skeletal robustness is obvious.
[3] Experiments showed that adrenaline increases twitch, but not tetanic force, and not rate of force development (which is necessary for fast and high power movements).
[4] Internal bleeding is serious for two reasons: The excess blood can compress organs and cause their dysfunction (as can occur in hematoma). When the bleeding does not stop spontaneously, the loss of blood will cause hemorrhagic shock, which can lead to brain damage and death. If there is pressure, it may lead to death or a brain hemorrhage.
*edit made april 8, 2015
Thursday, 7 August 2014
No Glory in War: the only way to commemorate WW1
We must always question our ability to know, especially with regards to how millions of men can be swayed and pressured into fighting a senseless conflict.
The gruesome consequences of war
To what end do we fight? Who benefits from war? Who pays the ultimate price?
Friday, 30 May 2014
Repost: Common a priori objections by “debunkers”
(Note: This entire article has been duplicated from activistnyc.wordpress.com. It can be read in full with this link)
Every now and then I get a wave of “debunkers” visiting this blog. They’re welcome to post here; I’ve learned a lot from them. But, in the future, I would like to try to avoid certain repetitious arguments, or at least confine those particular arguments to relevant threads such as this one.
There are some a priori arguments they almost always bring up in an effort to prove that there could not have been any government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. In recent debates here, those arguments got jumbled together with other, meatier issues in comment threads.
To avoid such jumbling in the future, I’ve decided to devote this post to the more common a priori arguments. I’ll then add a rule to my comment policy requiring that, in the future, these and similar a priori arguments be discussed only in comments below this post (or other posts on these same topics), rather than jumbled together with other, more substantive discussions.
In this post I’ll also provide a brief review of my debates with “debunkers” in general, for the benefit of “debunkers” visiting this blog for the first time. Some of the discussions we’ve had here have been very worthwhile.
The most common a priori arguments
The most common a priori argument is a claim that the culprits could not have gotten away with it.
The usual form of this is the “someone would have talked” argument. Related to this is the “too many people” argument, the claim that too many people would have to have been in on the plot, or at least would have noticed something strange going on, thereby making it impossible to keep a secret.
Also common are arguments from authority, It is claimed that we should not question the experts who say that WTC 1, 2, and 7 all collapsed as a result of nothing more than two jet crashes and the resulting fires.
Also it is often claimed that there were no likely motives, either for government complicity in the 9/11 attacks in general or for the destruction of WTC 7 in particular. And, in my opinion, many 9/11 Truth activists don’t do the best possible job of stating the likely motives. I will try to remedy what I see as some deficiencies in that regard.
One type of complicity hypothesis, defended here
In this post I’ll be defending the feasibility of one particular type of hypothesis about possible government complicity in the 9/11 attack. The type of hypothesis outlined below would be categorized by Nicholas Levis as “LIHOP plus”:
There were real hijackers. Al Qaeda is a real organization, but heavily infiltrated by the FBI, the CIA, and intelligence agencies from various other countries around the world. The infiltrators likely include agent provocateurs as well as just plain spies. At least a few high U.S. officials had very specific and detailed foreknowledge, which might have come to them not only via the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc., but also via warnings from foreign governments, plus informal high-level channels such as, perhaps, the Bush / bin Laden family friendship. The attacks were aided and supplemented in various ways by one or more high officials and a handful of other people, e.g. by preventing FBI interference in the hijackers’ plot, slowing down the air defense system to allow the hijackers to reach their targets, and possibly by either demolishing the WTC buildings or at least supplementing the attack on the WTC buildings via bombs or arson.
I do not necessarily believe that any particular hypothesis along the above lines actually happened, but I do believe it to be a real possibility, one of many possible scenarios that might lie behind the 9/11 coverup. The point of this post is not to prove that anything in particular actually did happen, but merely to show that hypotheses of the above type are possible.
Could this sort of thing have actually happened? Or would it have entailed too many people, who would have talked? I’ll explore these questions below.
But first, I should note that not everyone in the 9/11 Truth movement agrees with hypotheses of the above type. Not everyone in the 9/11 Truth movement advocates the WTC demolition idea. Some focus only on air defense issues, warnings and foreknowledge, etc. On the other hand, there are many other people in the 9/11 Truth movement who hold a pure “MIHOP” view, according to which there were no hijackers, and the planes were just remote-controlled, or something. I will not be defending the latter view here.
I’m currently agnostic on the question of what was done to the WTC buildings. In this post, I will defend the possibility that the collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7 could have been something other than purely natural consequences of the two jet crashes. (In this post, I won’t discuss the arguments against the purely natural collapse idea. I’ll discuss those in future posts.)
Letting the hijackers do their thing: People DID talk!
In my opinion, the only parts of the above “LIHOP plus” scenario that would need to have been known by more than a handful of people would have been (1) the foreknowledge by the FBI and by the intelligence agencies, and (2) the prevention of FBI and airport-security interference in the hijackers’ plot.
On these matters, lo and behold, there are people who have talked, such as FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and others listed on this page of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition site. The Jersey Girls have reported that they were approached by quite a few other whistleblowers who wanted to be called to testify before the 9/11 Commission, but who were never called, for whatever reason.
Also there has been quite a bit of talk about Able Danger, a military intelligence program which is said to have identified at least some of the 9/11 hijackers over a year before 9/11/2001.
FAA whistleblower Bogdan Dzakovic has remarked, “Since 9/11, I learned to have less contempt for the terrorists than I do for the bureaucrats and politicians who could have prevented 9/11 but didn’t.
They served in very pivotal positions of influence but due to gross incompetence or the fear of actually fulfilling their oaths of office to defend this country or possibly even something a bit more sinister, they failed to take any action. … Many of the FAA bureaucrats that actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration.” (Flying the deadly skies: Whistle-blower thinks the state of U.S. aviation security invites another attack by Bill Katovsky, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, July 9, 2006.)
Alas, whistleblowers too often don’t get listened to, as discussed in 9/11 whistleblowers ignored, retaliated against by Michael Hampton, who concludes, “It’s clear now to anyone paying the least bit of attention that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were completely preventable.”
One could argue that the problems here were (and still are) just incompetence, negligence, and cronyism. Perhaps. Then again, that very same incompetence, negligence, and cronyism, on the part of the relevant bureaucracies as a whole, could also have enabled a few people at the top to get away with a whole lot worse. More about this below.
Air defense failures: Hiding any interference?
Was something done to slow down NORAD’s response? Was something done to prevent the hijacked planes from being even intercepted, let alone shot down? If so, how many people would have been needed to accomplish that?
Not very many. On a matter such as air defense, where every second counts, it takes only a few lackadaisical people in top positions to slow everything to a crawl.
According to Chapter 1 of the 9/11 Commission Report:
Why were “the right officials” unavailable for so long? It was already obvious, by the time the second plane hit WTC 2 at 9:03 AM, that “America is under attack,” as Andrew Card informed George Bush at 9:05 AM. By that time it was already known that American Airlines Flight 77 had been hijacked too.
It is hard to believe that “the right officials” could genuinely have been that incompetent. Even if they really were just that incompetent, they should have been at least fired, if not prosecuted for negligence.
Everyone can see that “the right officials” were, at the very least, criminally negligent. That obvious fact cannot be hidden. The only question is whether their crime was something worse than mere negligence.
Had NORAD succeeded in intercepting any of the planes, there were only two people who could then authorize a shoot-down: the President and the Secretary of Defense. Both Bush and Rumsfeld were less than diligent about making themselves available for consultation on such an every-second-counts decision. (See my posts Bush at Booker School on the morning of 9/11 George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers: Their whereabouts on 9/11, and see the comment threads below these posts for more details.)
An even more important question is why no planes were even intercepted in the first place. Some people in the 9/11 Truth movement have speculated that someone may have deliberately created extra confusion for NORAD/NEADS, e.g. via false blips on their radar screens. If indeed something like that was done, it probably would not have been difficult to hide. It could have been done by just one person plus whoever gave that person access.
In any case, we do know that we’ve been lied to about the air defense failures. (See the section The lack of air defense in my post My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11.) We just don’t know exactly what was covered up.
WTC: Hiding the planting of explosives, incendiaries, etc.?
Many people in the 9/11 Truth movement believe that other things were deliberately done to World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7, besides just crashing planes into the Twin Towers.
A common objection to this idea, by “debunkers,” is that the perpetrators’ activities could not have gone unnoticed.
But it seems to me that their work could easily have been disguised as some sort of maintenance or upgrade, provided that their entry into the building was authorized by someone in a position of authority at the WTC complex.
Six weeks before 9/11/2001, Larry Silverstein became the new leaseholder for the entire WTC complex (except for WTC 7, which he already owned). Given the change in management, it was only to be expected that there might be some new contractors as well, or perhaps some special maintenance consultants. So, the entry of some new and unusual (but authorized) contractors would not have raised any eyebrows on the part of the security staff.
Any work involving the core columns could easily have been disguised as some sort of elevator work.
The perimeter spandrels could perhaps have been accessed via crawlspaces (ceiling chambers).
Any work involving perimeter columns would have been a bit more difficult to hide, because it would have required going into offices, meaning that the tenants would have known that there was some sort of work being done in their offices. But it could have been disguised as some sort of maintenance that required drilling holes in walls, such as electrical work, and it could have been done late at night when the office staff was absent.
I will assume that it was not necessary to access perimeter columns on every floor, but only on a minority of the floors, if indeed that was done at all. Thus the workers could easily have avoided those relatively few offices that were open 24 hours a day.
Whatever was done, it need not have required anywhere nearly as much work as a standard controlled demolition. The perpetrators need not have concerned themselves with various safety issues that are of concern to commercial demolition contractors. The collapse of the Twin Towers, and to a lesser extent WTC 7 too, spewed debris all over the place, damaging surrounding buildings, which is something a standard controlled domolition aims to avoid.
So I think it’s possible that the work could have done by as few as three or four people, maybe at most six or so.
(Reminder to “debunkers”: The point of the above is only to defend the possibility that the WTC collapses may have had a little extra help. I’m aware that my speculation does not prove that any such thing was actually done. Actual evidence for any such scenario is a separate topic, to be discussed in other posts.)
(P.S., 3/6/2008: The above is a summary of my replies to westprog99, originally in the comment thread following my post He oughta know better: Mark Roberts and the iron spherules, recently transplanted to my new post Hiding the planting of incendiaries, explosives, or whatever? Response to a common a priori objection. Comments on this topic should be posted underneath the latter post rather than here on this page.)
WTC: Why were no devices found in the rubble?
Another common objection by “debunkers” is that no remnants of explosive or incendiary devices were found in the rubble. Or, at least, no such remnants were noticed and publicly commented on.
In the first place, any such devices would most likely have gotten pulverized, along with nearly everything else.
Of course, they might not have all gotten pulverized.
Perhaps some remnants of devices were found, but people might have assumed that they were something else. A lot would depend on exactly what these devices looked like.
Another thing to consider is that the CIA was openly involved in the cleanup. The CIA had had an office in WTC 7 and searched the rubble during the cleanup, presumably to ensure that no classified documents went astray. (See the New York Times article The Intelligence Agency: Secret C.I.A. Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11 by James Risen, November 5, 2001. A copy of the printed version of this article is shown in the WTC 7 section of the video Loose Change Final Cut.)
If, by any chance, the CIA was in any way involved in the destruction of the WTC buildings, then, in addition to searching for classified documents, the same CIA agents could have searched for other things too, preventing those other things, too, from falling into the hands of other people. Those other things could have included … well, who knows what. Whatever the CIA agents might have been searching for besides papers, they had a perfect excuse to search the rubble thoroughly. And most likely they were around during pretty much the entire cleanup. How else could they have ensured that no classified documents fell into the wrong hands?
The CIA agents who searched the rubble might not, themselves, have known exactly what these mysterious objects were that they were searching for. They might have just been shown pictures and told to retrieve any objects that looked like thus-and-so, without being told exactly what those objects were. In that case, they would simply have accepted that they didn’t need to know what the objects were. I would expect that kind of compartmentalization to be commonplace in intelligence agencies.
Then again, the above hypothesis about CIA involvement in the cleanup might not have been necessary, if the devices themselves were sufficiently well-disguised.
Likewise, residues may or may not have been easily detectable, depending on what was used. For example, thermite leaves a residue consisting mostly of iron and aluminum oxide, both of which would have been present in the rubble anyway. So, to detect thermite residue, one would also need to look for other evidence, e.g. evidence that sufficiently high temperatures were reached in at least a few places.
(Reminder to “debunkers”: Again, the point of the above is only to defend only the possibility of an inside-job hypothesis regarding the destruction of the WTC buildings. I don’t claim to know what actually happened to the WTC buildings, or whether the CIA was in any way involved.)
Structural engineers and arguments from authority
A common response to WTC demolition hypotheses is: “Not a single structural engineer in the entire world agree with you! Every structural engineer in the entire world says that the WTC buildings collapsed solely due to jet impacts and resulting fires.”
First, that’s not true. There are some structural engineers who are members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Admittedly, not very many yet, but we’ll see who else joins.
When that’s pointed out, a “debunker” will usually reply, “Well, every single one of the world’s other structural engineers, besides the very few listed on the AE911T website, agrees that the WTC buildings collapsed solely due to jet impacts and fire.”
Well, that’s probably not accurate either.
First, the majority of the world’s structural engineers have probably not studied the WTC collapses themselves, beyond reading the pronouncements of mainstream experts. Most structural engineers probably have not even read the entire NIST report, for example. And, as the “debunkers” themselves are fond of pointing out in other contexts (e.g. in response to the argument that no steel-frame skyscraper has ever collapsed due to fire), every building is unique, with its own strengths and vulnerabilities. So, a structural engineer would have to have studied the WTC buildings oneself in order to have an informed opinion about them.
If one is going to do a numbers comparison, it would be fair to compare only those on both sides who have actually studied the WTC buildings and the WTC collapses on their own, rather than just reading summary reports in trade journals.
Furthermore, it’s likely that there exist at least a few structural engineers who agree with AE911T but who hesitate to join, out of fear of having their full legal names published on a controversial website. (I myself have not joined AE911T for that very reason. I’m playing it safe in that regard, given how some 9/11 Truth activists here in New York have been personally harassed. I’m not a structural engineer, but I do have a different kind of engineering background. It wouldn’t surprise me if at least a few structural engineers preferred to support the 9/11 Truth movement in more anonymous ways too.)
However, as far as I am aware, the “debunkers” are indeed correct that the purely-natural collapse hypothesis is the unanimously accepted orthodoxy in structural engineering journals.
So the question now is whether the consensus in structural engineering journals should be considered infallible – or, at least, sufficiently close to infallible that no one, and especially no one outside the field of structural engineering itself, should ever presume to question it.
(P.S., 2/28/2008: The remainder of this section is mis-stated. See the P.S. after this section, and see the discussion in comments below this thread.)
Well, let’s consider what kind of a field structural engineering is. In their more honest moments, structural engineers will admit that their field is on a somewhat less sound scientific experimental footing than most other kinds of engineering. For example, this post in the JREF forum, by Newton’s Bit, ends with the following quote:
The problem is this: In almost any other kind of engineering, complete prototypes of any given product are built and thoroughly tested before the product is mass-produced and sold. If structural engineering were like almost every other kind of engineering, complete prototypes would be built and thoroughly built and tested, not necessarily for every single building, but at least for every building of a new and unusual design. Alas, that would be prohibitively expensive. For skyscrapers, it’s common to build and test prototype floor assemblies, but not a prototype for the entire building.
If structural engineering were like almost every other kind of engineering, there would be frequent experiments in which buildings, of various different kinds, were built for the purpose of setting them on fire to see whether and how they collapse. Such experiments have been done occasionally (e.g. Cardington Fire Test: The Behaviour of a Multi-storey Steel Framed Building Subjected to Fire Attack), but not very often. There’s just not enough funding for such experiments.
Ditto for experiments involving other kinds of damage to buildings. Also, there has not been much experimental study of the phenomenon of progressive collapse, which is said to have brought down WTC 1, 2, and 7. (Regarding the rarity of such study, see, for example, The science of how buildings fall down by Colin Nickerson, Boston Globe, December 3, 2007.)
For more about this matter, please see my post Engineers were surprised by the WTC collapses, December 7, 2007.
Another problem is this: In a field with relatively little hard scientific data (compared to what one might expect in other engineering disciplines that have been around for a long time), there’s lots of wiggle room for as-yet-unfalsified hypotheses. And, given whatever wiggle room they may have, most people will wiggle in a direction which they see as beneficial to their careers, and which avoids any boat-rocking. This factor might well have inflated the consensus in favor of the official story.
Even one of the most knowledgeable and articulate “debunkers,” Frank Greening, has acknowledged that institutional bias can be a problem. He’s a co-author of the latest Bazant paper, but he is nevertheless highly critical of the NIST report. (See his fascinating post Confessions of a 9/11 Agnostic, on page 6 of the thread Debate! What debate? in the JREF forum.) As far as I can tell, he suspects a coverup, not of 9/11 being an inside job, but of possible flaws in the design of the WTC buildings. (See also this post of his in the JREF forum thread Another engineer criticizes NIST & FEMA.)
So, an orthodoxy in the field of structural engineering should not be regarded as beyond question.
At the same time, those of us who question that consensus should certainly not regard ourselves as infallible either. The collapses of the WTC buildings involved many factors that need to be examined cautiously and in quantitative detail, and on which too many people in the 9/11 Truth movement have jumped to premature conclusions. (See my post Demolition of WTC: Let’s not overstate the case, please.) We should not simply dismiss the orthodox view; we should at least try to understand it, to the best of our ability. And we should recognize that we ourselves do not have the final word. If we ourselves do not have the expertise needed to resolve the issues, we should encourage those challengers of the official story who do have at least some relevant expertise, but we should not endorse their views without question either. We should be willing to wait and see.
(P.S., 2/28/2008: In this and subsequent comments, westprog99 argues that structural engineering is, in fact, a “mature discipline.” See the ensuing discussion. It might have been more accurate for me to say, as I do in this comment, that the field of structural engineering is probably “mature” on the question of what is needed to ensure the safety of buildings under normal conditions, but perhaps not quite so “mature” on the question of how buildings of various different kinds perform under various extreme conditions.)
The most likely main motive for complicity, by high officials, in the 9/11 attacks
In my long-ago post Reply to some folks at Screw Loose Change, one objection I did not respond to very well was this one:
The most likely main motive probably had to do with Afghanistan, the country which was invaded almost immediately after 9/11. Before 9/11/2001, there were actual military preparations, not just a plan, to invade Afghanistan. However, if 9/11 had not happened, it would have been extremely difficult to sell the American public on the idea of invading Afghanistan, given what a meat grinder Afghanistan had been for the Soviet Union back in the 1980’s. (For documentation on the preparations for an invasion of Afghanistan, see the section on The war in Afghanistan in my post My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11.)
This, the need to justify an invasion of Afghanistan is a likely motive for complicity in the 9/11 attacks, regardless of the reasons why the Bush administration wanted to invade Afghanistan in the first place. Most likely there were several different motives for the invasion. The relative importance of these motives can be debated.
One topic that has been debated quite a bit is the role of oil (and other energy sources such as natural gas) in U.S. foreign policy. Some interesting information on this topic can be found on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations. (See especially this collection of pages on “energy security.”)
The Bush administration got lots of mileage out of 9/11, on more matters than just Afghanistan. It provided an excuse for the Iraq war too, and for torture, and for various curtailments of civil liberties. These other things could perhaps be seen as secondary motives, but the most likely primary motive was to provide an excuse for invading Afghanistan.
But why destroy WTC 7?
Various “debunkers” have asked what the motive could have been for destroying WTC 7 in particular.
Some people in the 9/11 Truth movement have speculated that the motive might have been the destruction of records. WTC 7 had a lot of interesting tenants, including the CIA, the FBI, the EEOC, and the SEC, any one of which might have had something that the perpetrators wanted destroyed.
To this, “debunkers” have had two responses: (1) If the point is to destroy papers, why not just use a shredder? (2) All but the most recent records were likely backed up somewhere anyway, so could not be destroyed.
My reply is that there’s a difference between (a) actually destroying records and (b) having a good excuse to lose records that one isn’t supposed to lose. The destruction of WTC 7 might have been good for the latter purpose, if not the former. Furthermore, in the event that the CIA was involved, they might have had something other than just records that they wanted destroyed.
Anyhow, there’s also another possible motive for the destruction of WTC 7. My guess is that, from the point of view of those who planned the destruction of the WTC buildings, there might have been a lot of unknowns, and that these unknowns were dealt with via redundancy.
The planners might not have known, for sure, whether the hijackers would succeed in hijacking the planes, and, if so, whether they would succeed in crashing into the buildings, and, if so, whether the resulting damage and fires (plus whatever devices might have been planted in the Towers, if any) would succeed in bringing the Towers down. In case the above did not fully succeed, then perhaps the collapse of a third skyscraper might provide the desired melodrama.
Given how WTC 7 was hit by flying debris, the planners may have decided, on the fly, to use that as an excuse for an allegedly “natural” collapse, and to time their remote-controlled devices accordingly, e.g. by first setting off incendiary devices on floors 7 and above to start the fires, and then waiting 7 hours to destroy the building by setting off incendiaries or explosives further down, say, on floor 5. But, in the event that WTC 7 had not been hit by flying debris, I’m assuming here that the planners would have had some sort of backup excuse for the collapse of WTC 7 – perhaps even bombs (or incendiaries) planted by a “terrorist.” But the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 provided a much better excuse, so they went with that one.
In addition, if the planners also wanted to destroy one or more specific offices in WTC 7, for whatever reason, they would have done so by two redundant means: First, by just setting the specific office(s) on fire. But the planners could not have known in advance whether fire fighters would succeed in putting out the fires in WTC 7. To deal with that uncertainty, demolishing the entire building might have been a backup means of destroying whatever offices the planners wanted to destroy.
Disclaimer: This entire discussion about WTC 7 is hypothetical, since I don’t claim to know what happened to the WTC buildings, let alone what the motives were.
Common a priori objections by “debunkers,” including arguments from authority and the “someone would have talked” and “too many people” arguments
Every now and then I get a wave of “debunkers” visiting this blog. They’re welcome to post here; I’ve learned a lot from them. But, in the future, I would like to try to avoid certain repetitious arguments, or at least confine those particular arguments to relevant threads such as this one.
There are some a priori arguments they almost always bring up in an effort to prove that there could not have been any government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. In recent debates here, those arguments got jumbled together with other, meatier issues in comment threads.
To avoid such jumbling in the future, I’ve decided to devote this post to the more common a priori arguments. I’ll then add a rule to my comment policy requiring that, in the future, these and similar a priori arguments be discussed only in comments below this post (or other posts on these same topics), rather than jumbled together with other, more substantive discussions.
In this post I’ll also provide a brief review of my debates with “debunkers” in general, for the benefit of “debunkers” visiting this blog for the first time. Some of the discussions we’ve had here have been very worthwhile.
- The most common a priori arguments
- One type of complicity hypothesis, defended here
- Letting the hijackers do their thing: People DID talk!
- Air defense failures: Hiding any interference?
- WTC: Hiding the planting of explosives, incendiaries, etc.?
- WTC: Why were no devices found in the rubble?
- Structural engineers and arguments from authority
- The most likely main motive for complicity, by high officials, in the 9/11 attacks
- But why destroy WTC 7?
The most common a priori arguments
The most common a priori argument is a claim that the culprits could not have gotten away with it.
The usual form of this is the “someone would have talked” argument. Related to this is the “too many people” argument, the claim that too many people would have to have been in on the plot, or at least would have noticed something strange going on, thereby making it impossible to keep a secret.
Also common are arguments from authority, It is claimed that we should not question the experts who say that WTC 1, 2, and 7 all collapsed as a result of nothing more than two jet crashes and the resulting fires.
Also it is often claimed that there were no likely motives, either for government complicity in the 9/11 attacks in general or for the destruction of WTC 7 in particular. And, in my opinion, many 9/11 Truth activists don’t do the best possible job of stating the likely motives. I will try to remedy what I see as some deficiencies in that regard.
One type of complicity hypothesis, defended here
In this post I’ll be defending the feasibility of one particular type of hypothesis about possible government complicity in the 9/11 attack. The type of hypothesis outlined below would be categorized by Nicholas Levis as “LIHOP plus”:
There were real hijackers. Al Qaeda is a real organization, but heavily infiltrated by the FBI, the CIA, and intelligence agencies from various other countries around the world. The infiltrators likely include agent provocateurs as well as just plain spies. At least a few high U.S. officials had very specific and detailed foreknowledge, which might have come to them not only via the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc., but also via warnings from foreign governments, plus informal high-level channels such as, perhaps, the Bush / bin Laden family friendship. The attacks were aided and supplemented in various ways by one or more high officials and a handful of other people, e.g. by preventing FBI interference in the hijackers’ plot, slowing down the air defense system to allow the hijackers to reach their targets, and possibly by either demolishing the WTC buildings or at least supplementing the attack on the WTC buildings via bombs or arson.
I do not necessarily believe that any particular hypothesis along the above lines actually happened, but I do believe it to be a real possibility, one of many possible scenarios that might lie behind the 9/11 coverup. The point of this post is not to prove that anything in particular actually did happen, but merely to show that hypotheses of the above type are possible.
Could this sort of thing have actually happened? Or would it have entailed too many people, who would have talked? I’ll explore these questions below.
But first, I should note that not everyone in the 9/11 Truth movement agrees with hypotheses of the above type. Not everyone in the 9/11 Truth movement advocates the WTC demolition idea. Some focus only on air defense issues, warnings and foreknowledge, etc. On the other hand, there are many other people in the 9/11 Truth movement who hold a pure “MIHOP” view, according to which there were no hijackers, and the planes were just remote-controlled, or something. I will not be defending the latter view here.
I’m currently agnostic on the question of what was done to the WTC buildings. In this post, I will defend the possibility that the collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7 could have been something other than purely natural consequences of the two jet crashes. (In this post, I won’t discuss the arguments against the purely natural collapse idea. I’ll discuss those in future posts.)
Letting the hijackers do their thing: People DID talk!
In my opinion, the only parts of the above “LIHOP plus” scenario that would need to have been known by more than a handful of people would have been (1) the foreknowledge by the FBI and by the intelligence agencies, and (2) the prevention of FBI and airport-security interference in the hijackers’ plot.
On these matters, lo and behold, there are people who have talked, such as FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and others listed on this page of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition site. The Jersey Girls have reported that they were approached by quite a few other whistleblowers who wanted to be called to testify before the 9/11 Commission, but who were never called, for whatever reason.
Also there has been quite a bit of talk about Able Danger, a military intelligence program which is said to have identified at least some of the 9/11 hijackers over a year before 9/11/2001.
FAA whistleblower Bogdan Dzakovic has remarked, “Since 9/11, I learned to have less contempt for the terrorists than I do for the bureaucrats and politicians who could have prevented 9/11 but didn’t.
They served in very pivotal positions of influence but due to gross incompetence or the fear of actually fulfilling their oaths of office to defend this country or possibly even something a bit more sinister, they failed to take any action. … Many of the FAA bureaucrats that actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration.” (Flying the deadly skies: Whistle-blower thinks the state of U.S. aviation security invites another attack by Bill Katovsky, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, July 9, 2006.)
Alas, whistleblowers too often don’t get listened to, as discussed in 9/11 whistleblowers ignored, retaliated against by Michael Hampton, who concludes, “It’s clear now to anyone paying the least bit of attention that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were completely preventable.”
One could argue that the problems here were (and still are) just incompetence, negligence, and cronyism. Perhaps. Then again, that very same incompetence, negligence, and cronyism, on the part of the relevant bureaucracies as a whole, could also have enabled a few people at the top to get away with a whole lot worse. More about this below.
Air defense failures: Hiding any interference?
Was something done to slow down NORAD’s response? Was something done to prevent the hijacked planes from being even intercepted, let alone shot down? If so, how many people would have been needed to accomplish that?
Not very many. On a matter such as air defense, where every second counts, it takes only a few lackadaisical people in top positions to slow everything to a crawl.
According to Chapter 1 of the 9/11 Commission Report:
The FAA, the White House, and the Defense Department each initiated a multiagency teleconference before 9:30. Because none of these teleconferences – at least before 10:00 – included the right officials from both the FAA and Defense Department, none succeeded in meaningfully coordinating the military and FAA response to the hijackings.
Why were “the right officials” unavailable for so long? It was already obvious, by the time the second plane hit WTC 2 at 9:03 AM, that “America is under attack,” as Andrew Card informed George Bush at 9:05 AM. By that time it was already known that American Airlines Flight 77 had been hijacked too.
It is hard to believe that “the right officials” could genuinely have been that incompetent. Even if they really were just that incompetent, they should have been at least fired, if not prosecuted for negligence.
Everyone can see that “the right officials” were, at the very least, criminally negligent. That obvious fact cannot be hidden. The only question is whether their crime was something worse than mere negligence.
Had NORAD succeeded in intercepting any of the planes, there were only two people who could then authorize a shoot-down: the President and the Secretary of Defense. Both Bush and Rumsfeld were less than diligent about making themselves available for consultation on such an every-second-counts decision. (See my posts Bush at Booker School on the morning of 9/11 George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Myers: Their whereabouts on 9/11, and see the comment threads below these posts for more details.)
An even more important question is why no planes were even intercepted in the first place. Some people in the 9/11 Truth movement have speculated that someone may have deliberately created extra confusion for NORAD/NEADS, e.g. via false blips on their radar screens. If indeed something like that was done, it probably would not have been difficult to hide. It could have been done by just one person plus whoever gave that person access.
In any case, we do know that we’ve been lied to about the air defense failures. (See the section The lack of air defense in my post My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11.) We just don’t know exactly what was covered up.
WTC: Hiding the planting of explosives, incendiaries, etc.?
Many people in the 9/11 Truth movement believe that other things were deliberately done to World Trade Center buildings 1, 2, and 7, besides just crashing planes into the Twin Towers.
A common objection to this idea, by “debunkers,” is that the perpetrators’ activities could not have gone unnoticed.
But it seems to me that their work could easily have been disguised as some sort of maintenance or upgrade, provided that their entry into the building was authorized by someone in a position of authority at the WTC complex.
Six weeks before 9/11/2001, Larry Silverstein became the new leaseholder for the entire WTC complex (except for WTC 7, which he already owned). Given the change in management, it was only to be expected that there might be some new contractors as well, or perhaps some special maintenance consultants. So, the entry of some new and unusual (but authorized) contractors would not have raised any eyebrows on the part of the security staff.
Any work involving the core columns could easily have been disguised as some sort of elevator work.
The perimeter spandrels could perhaps have been accessed via crawlspaces (ceiling chambers).
Any work involving perimeter columns would have been a bit more difficult to hide, because it would have required going into offices, meaning that the tenants would have known that there was some sort of work being done in their offices. But it could have been disguised as some sort of maintenance that required drilling holes in walls, such as electrical work, and it could have been done late at night when the office staff was absent.
I will assume that it was not necessary to access perimeter columns on every floor, but only on a minority of the floors, if indeed that was done at all. Thus the workers could easily have avoided those relatively few offices that were open 24 hours a day.
Whatever was done, it need not have required anywhere nearly as much work as a standard controlled demolition. The perpetrators need not have concerned themselves with various safety issues that are of concern to commercial demolition contractors. The collapse of the Twin Towers, and to a lesser extent WTC 7 too, spewed debris all over the place, damaging surrounding buildings, which is something a standard controlled domolition aims to avoid.
So I think it’s possible that the work could have done by as few as three or four people, maybe at most six or so.
(Reminder to “debunkers”: The point of the above is only to defend the possibility that the WTC collapses may have had a little extra help. I’m aware that my speculation does not prove that any such thing was actually done. Actual evidence for any such scenario is a separate topic, to be discussed in other posts.)
(P.S., 3/6/2008: The above is a summary of my replies to westprog99, originally in the comment thread following my post He oughta know better: Mark Roberts and the iron spherules, recently transplanted to my new post Hiding the planting of incendiaries, explosives, or whatever? Response to a common a priori objection. Comments on this topic should be posted underneath the latter post rather than here on this page.)
WTC: Why were no devices found in the rubble?
Another common objection by “debunkers” is that no remnants of explosive or incendiary devices were found in the rubble. Or, at least, no such remnants were noticed and publicly commented on.
In the first place, any such devices would most likely have gotten pulverized, along with nearly everything else.
Of course, they might not have all gotten pulverized.
Perhaps some remnants of devices were found, but people might have assumed that they were something else. A lot would depend on exactly what these devices looked like.
Another thing to consider is that the CIA was openly involved in the cleanup. The CIA had had an office in WTC 7 and searched the rubble during the cleanup, presumably to ensure that no classified documents went astray. (See the New York Times article The Intelligence Agency: Secret C.I.A. Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11 by James Risen, November 5, 2001. A copy of the printed version of this article is shown in the WTC 7 section of the video Loose Change Final Cut.)
If, by any chance, the CIA was in any way involved in the destruction of the WTC buildings, then, in addition to searching for classified documents, the same CIA agents could have searched for other things too, preventing those other things, too, from falling into the hands of other people. Those other things could have included … well, who knows what. Whatever the CIA agents might have been searching for besides papers, they had a perfect excuse to search the rubble thoroughly. And most likely they were around during pretty much the entire cleanup. How else could they have ensured that no classified documents fell into the wrong hands?
The CIA agents who searched the rubble might not, themselves, have known exactly what these mysterious objects were that they were searching for. They might have just been shown pictures and told to retrieve any objects that looked like thus-and-so, without being told exactly what those objects were. In that case, they would simply have accepted that they didn’t need to know what the objects were. I would expect that kind of compartmentalization to be commonplace in intelligence agencies.
Then again, the above hypothesis about CIA involvement in the cleanup might not have been necessary, if the devices themselves were sufficiently well-disguised.
Likewise, residues may or may not have been easily detectable, depending on what was used. For example, thermite leaves a residue consisting mostly of iron and aluminum oxide, both of which would have been present in the rubble anyway. So, to detect thermite residue, one would also need to look for other evidence, e.g. evidence that sufficiently high temperatures were reached in at least a few places.
(Reminder to “debunkers”: Again, the point of the above is only to defend only the possibility of an inside-job hypothesis regarding the destruction of the WTC buildings. I don’t claim to know what actually happened to the WTC buildings, or whether the CIA was in any way involved.)
Structural engineers and arguments from authority
A common response to WTC demolition hypotheses is: “Not a single structural engineer in the entire world agree with you! Every structural engineer in the entire world says that the WTC buildings collapsed solely due to jet impacts and resulting fires.”
First, that’s not true. There are some structural engineers who are members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. Admittedly, not very many yet, but we’ll see who else joins.
When that’s pointed out, a “debunker” will usually reply, “Well, every single one of the world’s other structural engineers, besides the very few listed on the AE911T website, agrees that the WTC buildings collapsed solely due to jet impacts and fire.”
Well, that’s probably not accurate either.
First, the majority of the world’s structural engineers have probably not studied the WTC collapses themselves, beyond reading the pronouncements of mainstream experts. Most structural engineers probably have not even read the entire NIST report, for example. And, as the “debunkers” themselves are fond of pointing out in other contexts (e.g. in response to the argument that no steel-frame skyscraper has ever collapsed due to fire), every building is unique, with its own strengths and vulnerabilities. So, a structural engineer would have to have studied the WTC buildings oneself in order to have an informed opinion about them.
If one is going to do a numbers comparison, it would be fair to compare only those on both sides who have actually studied the WTC buildings and the WTC collapses on their own, rather than just reading summary reports in trade journals.
Furthermore, it’s likely that there exist at least a few structural engineers who agree with AE911T but who hesitate to join, out of fear of having their full legal names published on a controversial website. (I myself have not joined AE911T for that very reason. I’m playing it safe in that regard, given how some 9/11 Truth activists here in New York have been personally harassed. I’m not a structural engineer, but I do have a different kind of engineering background. It wouldn’t surprise me if at least a few structural engineers preferred to support the 9/11 Truth movement in more anonymous ways too.)
However, as far as I am aware, the “debunkers” are indeed correct that the purely-natural collapse hypothesis is the unanimously accepted orthodoxy in structural engineering journals.
So the question now is whether the consensus in structural engineering journals should be considered infallible – or, at least, sufficiently close to infallible that no one, and especially no one outside the field of structural engineering itself, should ever presume to question it.
(P.S., 2/28/2008: The remainder of this section is mis-stated. See the P.S. after this section, and see the discussion in comments below this thread.)
Well, let’s consider what kind of a field structural engineering is. In their more honest moments, structural engineers will admit that their field is on a somewhat less sound scientific experimental footing than most other kinds of engineering. For example, this post in the JREF forum, by Newton’s Bit, ends with the following quote:
“Structural Engineering is the art of molding materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to understand forces we cannot really assess in such a way that the community at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our own ignorance.” James E Amrhein
The problem is this: In almost any other kind of engineering, complete prototypes of any given product are built and thoroughly tested before the product is mass-produced and sold. If structural engineering were like almost every other kind of engineering, complete prototypes would be built and thoroughly built and tested, not necessarily for every single building, but at least for every building of a new and unusual design. Alas, that would be prohibitively expensive. For skyscrapers, it’s common to build and test prototype floor assemblies, but not a prototype for the entire building.
If structural engineering were like almost every other kind of engineering, there would be frequent experiments in which buildings, of various different kinds, were built for the purpose of setting them on fire to see whether and how they collapse. Such experiments have been done occasionally (e.g. Cardington Fire Test: The Behaviour of a Multi-storey Steel Framed Building Subjected to Fire Attack), but not very often. There’s just not enough funding for such experiments.
Ditto for experiments involving other kinds of damage to buildings. Also, there has not been much experimental study of the phenomenon of progressive collapse, which is said to have brought down WTC 1, 2, and 7. (Regarding the rarity of such study, see, for example, The science of how buildings fall down by Colin Nickerson, Boston Globe, December 3, 2007.)
For more about this matter, please see my post Engineers were surprised by the WTC collapses, December 7, 2007.
Another problem is this: In a field with relatively little hard scientific data (compared to what one might expect in other engineering disciplines that have been around for a long time), there’s lots of wiggle room for as-yet-unfalsified hypotheses. And, given whatever wiggle room they may have, most people will wiggle in a direction which they see as beneficial to their careers, and which avoids any boat-rocking. This factor might well have inflated the consensus in favor of the official story.
Even one of the most knowledgeable and articulate “debunkers,” Frank Greening, has acknowledged that institutional bias can be a problem. He’s a co-author of the latest Bazant paper, but he is nevertheless highly critical of the NIST report. (See his fascinating post Confessions of a 9/11 Agnostic, on page 6 of the thread Debate! What debate? in the JREF forum.) As far as I can tell, he suspects a coverup, not of 9/11 being an inside job, but of possible flaws in the design of the WTC buildings. (See also this post of his in the JREF forum thread Another engineer criticizes NIST & FEMA.)
So, an orthodoxy in the field of structural engineering should not be regarded as beyond question.
At the same time, those of us who question that consensus should certainly not regard ourselves as infallible either. The collapses of the WTC buildings involved many factors that need to be examined cautiously and in quantitative detail, and on which too many people in the 9/11 Truth movement have jumped to premature conclusions. (See my post Demolition of WTC: Let’s not overstate the case, please.) We should not simply dismiss the orthodox view; we should at least try to understand it, to the best of our ability. And we should recognize that we ourselves do not have the final word. If we ourselves do not have the expertise needed to resolve the issues, we should encourage those challengers of the official story who do have at least some relevant expertise, but we should not endorse their views without question either. We should be willing to wait and see.
(P.S., 2/28/2008: In this and subsequent comments, westprog99 argues that structural engineering is, in fact, a “mature discipline.” See the ensuing discussion. It might have been more accurate for me to say, as I do in this comment, that the field of structural engineering is probably “mature” on the question of what is needed to ensure the safety of buildings under normal conditions, but perhaps not quite so “mature” on the question of how buildings of various different kinds perform under various extreme conditions.)
The most likely main motive for complicity, by high officials, in the 9/11 attacks
In my long-ago post Reply to some folks at Screw Loose Change, one objection I did not respond to very well was this one:
4. If your whole plan is to attack Iraq, why not blame the attacks on Saddam? Wouldn’t that actually help to further your goals, instead of the nonsensical “frame Osama to attack a country that has nothing to do with our target” scheme?I still stand by most of what I said in reply to that objection:
Perhaps because Al Qaeda already existed, and perhaps because making use of Al Qaeda was both easier and less suspicious-looking than cooking up a totally new CIA-front Iraqi “terrorist group” from scratch. Also, the point of the 9/11 attacks, from the point of view of the American perpetrators, probably wasn’t just to justify a short-term war against Iraq or Afghanistan, but to justify a century of “war on terror,” with a variety of targets. That would explain why the attacks had to be so exceedingly massive and dramatic, as well as explaining why the exact nationality of the terrorist group wasn’t too important, as long as they were Islamist and thus could be tied, in the American popular imagination, to just about any Muslim country that the administration might choose to go to war with for whatever reason.But I would now add the following:
The most likely main motive probably had to do with Afghanistan, the country which was invaded almost immediately after 9/11. Before 9/11/2001, there were actual military preparations, not just a plan, to invade Afghanistan. However, if 9/11 had not happened, it would have been extremely difficult to sell the American public on the idea of invading Afghanistan, given what a meat grinder Afghanistan had been for the Soviet Union back in the 1980’s. (For documentation on the preparations for an invasion of Afghanistan, see the section on The war in Afghanistan in my post My main reasons for being suspicious about 9/11.)
This, the need to justify an invasion of Afghanistan is a likely motive for complicity in the 9/11 attacks, regardless of the reasons why the Bush administration wanted to invade Afghanistan in the first place. Most likely there were several different motives for the invasion. The relative importance of these motives can be debated.
One topic that has been debated quite a bit is the role of oil (and other energy sources such as natural gas) in U.S. foreign policy. Some interesting information on this topic can be found on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations. (See especially this collection of pages on “energy security.”)
The Bush administration got lots of mileage out of 9/11, on more matters than just Afghanistan. It provided an excuse for the Iraq war too, and for torture, and for various curtailments of civil liberties. These other things could perhaps be seen as secondary motives, but the most likely primary motive was to provide an excuse for invading Afghanistan.
But why destroy WTC 7?
Various “debunkers” have asked what the motive could have been for destroying WTC 7 in particular.
Some people in the 9/11 Truth movement have speculated that the motive might have been the destruction of records. WTC 7 had a lot of interesting tenants, including the CIA, the FBI, the EEOC, and the SEC, any one of which might have had something that the perpetrators wanted destroyed.
To this, “debunkers” have had two responses: (1) If the point is to destroy papers, why not just use a shredder? (2) All but the most recent records were likely backed up somewhere anyway, so could not be destroyed.
My reply is that there’s a difference between (a) actually destroying records and (b) having a good excuse to lose records that one isn’t supposed to lose. The destruction of WTC 7 might have been good for the latter purpose, if not the former. Furthermore, in the event that the CIA was involved, they might have had something other than just records that they wanted destroyed.
Anyhow, there’s also another possible motive for the destruction of WTC 7. My guess is that, from the point of view of those who planned the destruction of the WTC buildings, there might have been a lot of unknowns, and that these unknowns were dealt with via redundancy.
The planners might not have known, for sure, whether the hijackers would succeed in hijacking the planes, and, if so, whether they would succeed in crashing into the buildings, and, if so, whether the resulting damage and fires (plus whatever devices might have been planted in the Towers, if any) would succeed in bringing the Towers down. In case the above did not fully succeed, then perhaps the collapse of a third skyscraper might provide the desired melodrama.
Given how WTC 7 was hit by flying debris, the planners may have decided, on the fly, to use that as an excuse for an allegedly “natural” collapse, and to time their remote-controlled devices accordingly, e.g. by first setting off incendiary devices on floors 7 and above to start the fires, and then waiting 7 hours to destroy the building by setting off incendiaries or explosives further down, say, on floor 5. But, in the event that WTC 7 had not been hit by flying debris, I’m assuming here that the planners would have had some sort of backup excuse for the collapse of WTC 7 – perhaps even bombs (or incendiaries) planted by a “terrorist.” But the collapse of WTC 1 and 2 provided a much better excuse, so they went with that one.
In addition, if the planners also wanted to destroy one or more specific offices in WTC 7, for whatever reason, they would have done so by two redundant means: First, by just setting the specific office(s) on fire. But the planners could not have known in advance whether fire fighters would succeed in putting out the fires in WTC 7. To deal with that uncertainty, demolishing the entire building might have been a backup means of destroying whatever offices the planners wanted to destroy.
Disclaimer: This entire discussion about WTC 7 is hypothetical, since I don’t claim to know what happened to the WTC buildings, let alone what the motives were.
Friday, 18 April 2014
Computational incompressibility
Some of the things that go on in this mysterious reality of ours are totally beyond the ability of sapients to understand. Just as it would be impossible for a dog or cat to grasp the theory of relativity, it may well be impossible for a human to discern the true meaning of life. Even if god itself decided to step into our world and explain such things, the words would have no meaning to us. Some information is so densely encoded that it simply cannot be passed on from a higher toposophic to a lower. The superintelligent entitys which populate science fiction will often say and do things which simply cannot be explained to baseline humans. One example of this would be in the popular game mass effect, when commander shepard attempts to interrogate an AI named sovereign, and find out why it desires to exterminate all life in the galaxy. Shepard: “What do you want from us? Slaves, resources?” Sovereign: “My kind transcends your very understanding. We are each a nation,
independent, free of all weakness. You cannot even grasp the nature of
our existence.”
A conversation with sovereign
Why
would the game have a villain that can't explain its motives to the
heroes? Isn't that just a lazy plot device to enable a giant battle?
Well, no. In an example of fridge brilliance, the developers of mass effect had just
hit upon one of the major issues that will complicate relations between
man and god: Computational incompressibility. In a recent article [1], philosopher paul
humphreys describes this as a behavioural facet which is underivable by a
process simpler than whatever actualizes that behaviour. One manifestation of this is the inability of great apes and parrots (some of whom have a vocabulary of hundreds of words) to have a real conversation with their caretakers. These creatures may be able to vocalise/signal, but they cannot use language or any other human domain features. This is not surprising: Homo sapiens are the worlds only general intelligence, which means we have a quantitative and qualitative superiority over all other animal species in terms of cognition. There may be near-equals in one or two categorys, but none compete with us in all eight.
A necessary simplification
It goes without saying, but intelligence isn't isotropic. This becomes very obvious when observing individuals with savantism, who exhibit peak human abilitys in the realm of mathematics and aesthetics (particularly music), but are extremely deficient in all other areas of cognition. Many savants are not even able to dress themselves! This alone should be enough to put doubt upon charles spearmans g-factor hypothesis: When you throw in the possibility that there may be entire toposophic realms above the human level, then its usefulness as a universal intelligence test becomes nul and void. Anyway... Computational incompressability represents an anthropomorphic problem for us, in that even when we know that we are dealing with an alien mind far smarter than us, we tend to underestimate what its true capabilitys might be [2]. This tendancy explains why so many people either disregard the dangers posed by a superintelligence, or assume that such creatures could be easily bargained or reasoned with.
[1] http://philpapers.org/rec/HUMCAC
[2] http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/readinggroup/barrett1996.pdf
[1] http://philpapers.org/rec/HUMCAC
[2] http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/readinggroup/barrett1996.pdf
Video transcript
[Fighting and containing transapients, part 1. This video was released to youtube on october 8, 2012. It was eventually removed on behalf of fox broadcasting, so the contents will be reposted in text format. An archived copy is available here]
A superintelligent intellect is one that has the capacity to radically outperform the best human brains in practically every field, including problem solving, brute calculation, scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. Such entities may function as super-expert systems that work to execute on any goal it is given so long as it falls within the laws of physics and it has access to the requisite resources. Sometimes, a distinction is made between weak and strong superintelligence. Weak superintelligence is what you would get if you could run a human intellect at an accelerated clock speed, such as by uploading it to a fast computer. If the uploads clock-rate were a thousand times that of a biological brain, it would perceive reality as being slowed down by a factor of a thousand. It would think a thousand times more thoughts in a given time interval than its biological counterpart. Unfortunately, no matter how much you speed up the brain of a creature like a dog, you're not going to get the equivalent of a human intellect. Analogously, there might be kinds of smartness that wouldn't be accessible to even very fast human brains given their current capacities. Something else is needed for that. Strong superintelligence refers to an intellect that is not only faster than a human brain but also smarter in a qualitative sense. Something as simple as increasing the size or connectivity of our neuronal networks might give us some of these capacities. Other improvements may require wholesale reorganization of our cognitive architecture or the addition of new layers of cognition on top of the old ones. When discussion of increasing ones smartness comes up, the question often arises: Does intelligence progress linearly, exponentially, or both?
In other words, is intelligence something that is isotropic? Does it look the same when scaled up or improved? Current evidence suggests not. Because if it did, then problems that realistically require one genius to solve should also be solvable by two or three non-genius, and that clearly is not the case. The only benefit that comes from having multiple thinkers on a subject is that each individual usually has a different viewpoint, specialise in different things, and have more brute force to throw at the problem. Thats where the synergistic effect of multiple minds coming together stems from. But clearly, this has a limit. The feats that can be performed by one person with an IQ of 180 cannot, in practise, be replicated by two people with an IQ of just 90. There are interesting examples of this phenomenon. (The right genius in the right place) Dozens of philosophers had pondered the solution to the paradoxes raised by zeno of elea. Some of the greatest minds in recorded history tried their hand at cracking it, but the paradoxes did not budge. They managed to withstand two millenia of attempts at scrutinising them. It was not until recently that a definitive answer was provided by peter lynds, in the paper time and classical and quantum mechanics. This suggests a non linear intelligence gradient. But why stop at the human level? After all, from a cosmopolitan viewpoint, the difference in smartness between individual humans is tiny compared to the difference between a human and a primate, or a reptile, or an arthropod. Giant disparitys in intelligence are what is of interest to us, especially given the task of repelling a hostile force of transapients.
This is because no matter how many primates you assemble, they will still not be able to perform the feats of a human, them being unable to understand why three minus two equals one, or to utter rené descartes famous philosophical statement. Let us posit a brand new theory of intelligence differentials. In a nod to orions arm, it will henceforth be known as sophontology, a dicipline which shall concern hypothesising the natures of minds occupying all points on the great toposophic plane. What ought to be the main yardstick of this approach? One idea comes to mind. It will go under the name of domain thresholds. A domain is a landscape that encapsulates minds whose natures follow a certain pattern. This pattern corresponds to the kinds of thought that a being is capable of. For humans, this includes language, self awareness, rationality, abstractness, theory of mind, objective permanence, mathematics, aesthetics, and others. Domain features are the reason why it is impossible to say, for example, that humans are x amounts of times smarter than an animal:We simply posses cognitive abilitys that they do not (which makes numerical comparisons impossible). That begs the question, how can a reasonable comparison be made between something which is present, and something which is not? Theres no clear answer to this. Suffice to say, domain features are the point on the chart where the incremental curves into the exponential. That is something which has important ramifications in an intertoposophic war. After all, it is by definition not possible to compete with a being who exhibits domain features you lack. A reptile cannot compete with a human at arithmetic. It does not even have any concept of numbers.
There is every reason to believe that there are more domain features which the human archetype has not evolved to exploit. A superintelligence will be able to take advantage of this, and compete with us in behavioral categorys which we have no hope of responding to. There are a number of historical precedents for these sorts of things happening. Most recently, was the rise of the hominids. With only a mere tripling in brain size, the descendants of australopithecus were able to surpass all others and dominate the world: Without objective permanence or abstract thought, the animals that these ancient pre-humans competed against had no way to fight back strategically. They had no notions of area denial, of scorched earth, of distance weapons or physical traps. Why should we think the situation would be any different for us, going up against a band of transapients? In the orions arm encyclopedia, a wide variety of such conflicts are portrayed in realistic fasion. One area in which the OA are unique is the fact that they have multiple different stages of superintelligence, six in total, each more powerful and more foreign than the previous. This notion would have much in common with the concept of domain thresholds. Of particular interest is the encyclopedias rejection of the so called plucky baseline meme, which is the idea that ordinary unenhanced human beings can still give a good account of themselves in the face of overwhelming posthuman intelligence and firepower. The OA have determined it an impossibility for any non-superintelligent individual or group to carry out the following actions:
So - for the purposes of this discussion - the only way that a mere sapient can match a transapient is by emself becoming a transapient. A flatworm in a muddy pond cannot appreciate works of art, or understand general relativity. But if it evolves or is provolved to human equivalence, and becomes human, then it can. It would be ridiculous to have a "plucky flatworm" beating up a human, or out-performing one in literary criticism or university calculus, while still remaining a flatworm. But for a flatworm to evolve into a human, that also means it would no longer be the same being, it would be changed, totally, in every way; ascended and transcended beyond its original condition.
A superintelligent intellect is one that has the capacity to radically outperform the best human brains in practically every field, including problem solving, brute calculation, scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. Such entities may function as super-expert systems that work to execute on any goal it is given so long as it falls within the laws of physics and it has access to the requisite resources. Sometimes, a distinction is made between weak and strong superintelligence. Weak superintelligence is what you would get if you could run a human intellect at an accelerated clock speed, such as by uploading it to a fast computer. If the uploads clock-rate were a thousand times that of a biological brain, it would perceive reality as being slowed down by a factor of a thousand. It would think a thousand times more thoughts in a given time interval than its biological counterpart. Unfortunately, no matter how much you speed up the brain of a creature like a dog, you're not going to get the equivalent of a human intellect. Analogously, there might be kinds of smartness that wouldn't be accessible to even very fast human brains given their current capacities. Something else is needed for that. Strong superintelligence refers to an intellect that is not only faster than a human brain but also smarter in a qualitative sense. Something as simple as increasing the size or connectivity of our neuronal networks might give us some of these capacities. Other improvements may require wholesale reorganization of our cognitive architecture or the addition of new layers of cognition on top of the old ones. When discussion of increasing ones smartness comes up, the question often arises: Does intelligence progress linearly, exponentially, or both?
In other words, is intelligence something that is isotropic? Does it look the same when scaled up or improved? Current evidence suggests not. Because if it did, then problems that realistically require one genius to solve should also be solvable by two or three non-genius, and that clearly is not the case. The only benefit that comes from having multiple thinkers on a subject is that each individual usually has a different viewpoint, specialise in different things, and have more brute force to throw at the problem. Thats where the synergistic effect of multiple minds coming together stems from. But clearly, this has a limit. The feats that can be performed by one person with an IQ of 180 cannot, in practise, be replicated by two people with an IQ of just 90. There are interesting examples of this phenomenon. (The right genius in the right place) Dozens of philosophers had pondered the solution to the paradoxes raised by zeno of elea. Some of the greatest minds in recorded history tried their hand at cracking it, but the paradoxes did not budge. They managed to withstand two millenia of attempts at scrutinising them. It was not until recently that a definitive answer was provided by peter lynds, in the paper time and classical and quantum mechanics. This suggests a non linear intelligence gradient. But why stop at the human level? After all, from a cosmopolitan viewpoint, the difference in smartness between individual humans is tiny compared to the difference between a human and a primate, or a reptile, or an arthropod. Giant disparitys in intelligence are what is of interest to us, especially given the task of repelling a hostile force of transapients.
This is because no matter how many primates you assemble, they will still not be able to perform the feats of a human, them being unable to understand why three minus two equals one, or to utter rené descartes famous philosophical statement. Let us posit a brand new theory of intelligence differentials. In a nod to orions arm, it will henceforth be known as sophontology, a dicipline which shall concern hypothesising the natures of minds occupying all points on the great toposophic plane. What ought to be the main yardstick of this approach? One idea comes to mind. It will go under the name of domain thresholds. A domain is a landscape that encapsulates minds whose natures follow a certain pattern. This pattern corresponds to the kinds of thought that a being is capable of. For humans, this includes language, self awareness, rationality, abstractness, theory of mind, objective permanence, mathematics, aesthetics, and others. Domain features are the reason why it is impossible to say, for example, that humans are x amounts of times smarter than an animal:We simply posses cognitive abilitys that they do not (which makes numerical comparisons impossible). That begs the question, how can a reasonable comparison be made between something which is present, and something which is not? Theres no clear answer to this. Suffice to say, domain features are the point on the chart where the incremental curves into the exponential. That is something which has important ramifications in an intertoposophic war. After all, it is by definition not possible to compete with a being who exhibits domain features you lack. A reptile cannot compete with a human at arithmetic. It does not even have any concept of numbers.
Domain thresholds: Non-sapients occupy the
1st rung, sapients occupy the 2nd rung, while
transapients occupy the 3rd rung
There is every reason to believe that there are more domain features which the human archetype has not evolved to exploit. A superintelligence will be able to take advantage of this, and compete with us in behavioral categorys which we have no hope of responding to. There are a number of historical precedents for these sorts of things happening. Most recently, was the rise of the hominids. With only a mere tripling in brain size, the descendants of australopithecus were able to surpass all others and dominate the world: Without objective permanence or abstract thought, the animals that these ancient pre-humans competed against had no way to fight back strategically. They had no notions of area denial, of scorched earth, of distance weapons or physical traps. Why should we think the situation would be any different for us, going up against a band of transapients? In the orions arm encyclopedia, a wide variety of such conflicts are portrayed in realistic fasion. One area in which the OA are unique is the fact that they have multiple different stages of superintelligence, six in total, each more powerful and more foreign than the previous. This notion would have much in common with the concept of domain thresholds. Of particular interest is the encyclopedias rejection of the so called plucky baseline meme, which is the idea that ordinary unenhanced human beings can still give a good account of themselves in the face of overwhelming posthuman intelligence and firepower. The OA have determined it an impossibility for any non-superintelligent individual or group to carry out the following actions:
- to hack into an Angelnet or transapient Operating System (so it is impossible, literally, for a baseline-equivalent to hack into even an SI:1 angelnet, no matter how infinitely lucky e might be)
- Outwit or fool an Angelnet (e.g. smuggle in weapons, commit a murder, perform an act of sabotage, conceal one's position or motives, whatever)
- Out think or outperform on its own terms a transapient
- Correctly operate non-baseline friendly transapient tech (including weapons)
- In any way comprehend or reverse engineer transapient tech
- escape unaided from ahuman exploitation
- have any victory against a transapient "pest extermination team" sent to get rid of you
- outperform or beat or overwhelm in a military manner and/or by superior force of numbers an individual or group of transapients whose job is to get rid of you
- in any way harm an archailect
So - for the purposes of this discussion - the only way that a mere sapient can match a transapient is by emself becoming a transapient. A flatworm in a muddy pond cannot appreciate works of art, or understand general relativity. But if it evolves or is provolved to human equivalence, and becomes human, then it can. It would be ridiculous to have a "plucky flatworm" beating up a human, or out-performing one in literary criticism or university calculus, while still remaining a flatworm. But for a flatworm to evolve into a human, that also means it would no longer be the same being, it would be changed, totally, in every way; ascended and transcended beyond its original condition.
Saturday, 29 March 2014
Paradox of the machine gun
One of the most famous weapons of the second world war was the MG 42 machine gun, employed by the German army. It was a weapon with a fearsome reputation among Allied troops. The MG 42 was based on the archetypical MG 34, considered by many to be the first general purpose machine gun. It could serve as a light machine gun when using a bipod, or a heavy machine gun where using a tripod. Compared to other weapons of the time, the belt fed MG 42 not only had a higher cyclic rate of fire (at a rate of 1200-1500 rpm), but a higher sustained rate of fire as well. The wall of lead that came out of the gun barrel left a deep mark on many Allied soldiers. The MG 42 made prominent appearances in many memoirs and history books. What many don't seem to have considered is why the German army selected a machine gun with such an unusually high rate of fire. It went against their strict doctrine of ammo conservation, which demanded that a weapons cyclic fire rate be kept artificially low (so that even during a mad minute, ammunition expenditures would be sustainable).
Most sources on this matter will assert: ''The high rate of fire resulted from experiments with preceding weapons that concluded that since a soldier only has a short period of time to shoot at an enemy, it was imperative to fire the highest number of bullets possible to increase the likelihood of a hit... The disadvantage of applying this principle was that the weapon consumed exorbitant amounts of ammunition and quickly overheated its barrel, making sustained fire problematic.'' Or this: ''The Germans however came to the conclusion that a soldier in combat only fires when he sees the enemy and has but a few seconds to do so, taking this as a medium for all combatants they deemed it was he who fired an increased amount of bullets had an increased chance of a kill.'' But is there any truth to these explanations? An essay penned by our resident military guru, Jim Storr, suggest there is a completely different criterion that is not being accounted for.
Pondering the vast number of rounds per kill that are expended over the course of an engagement, like the notorious 250,000 bullets per KIA in Iraq and Afghanistan, Storr suggests that something is interfering with a modern armys ability to employ small arms fire. This goes beyond things like stress and return fire making our troops accuracy levels decreases. Indeed, even if we accept that most of the shots fired off in a battle are done only to suppress the enemy and not to kill him (since soldiers conceal themselves, they are hard to hit), this cannot explain how a quarter million rounds are expended just to kill one soldier: The only explanation is that the suppressing fire itself is being delivered in a fundamentally incorrect manner. Back in 1944, a study carried out by the army operational research group concluded that projectiles must not only pass within a certain proximity of a human combatant, but also arrive in a certain volume before he will feel threatened enough to take cover.
These are quantifiable data points that allow us to measure how much success a weapon and its user are having in a firefight. Armed with this knowledge, a group of soldiers from the British army were sent onto the firing range to train on a new piece of equipment, the live fire intelligent target. The results showed that most rounds fired missed by too wide a margin to drive an enemy to the ground, and that ammunition was expended at too high a rate to be sustainable for more than a few minutes. Thats consistent with what we have seen of other armys engaged in armed conflict: Infantrymen are not trained to excel at the role of suppression, nor do they have the proper weapons. The training problem can be solved by offering courses like those available at the TTECG, and giving sergeants stricter protocols for fire control. Of course, this still leaves us wondering what kind of small arm is best suited to suppression. If you thought it would be a belt fed, sustained fire weapon (with a quick change barrel) like the MG 42 or minimi, Storrs response will come as a disappointment:
''The British L86 magazinefed SA 80 Light Support Weapon (LSW), with its bipod, is extremely good at suppressing targets out to 500m or more... That is principally because it is accurate enough for almost every shot fired to contribute to suppression. The L110 (Minimi) Light Machine Gun (LMG) performs far worse in such trials. At best, only the first shot of a short burst passes close enough to suppress. However, subsequent shots in that burst go anything up to 6m wide of the mark at battlefield ranges.'' There is something very important that mr Storr neglected to consider, however. And that is the combat role that infantrymen have in mind for their machine guns. In WW2, the Germans placed a greater emphasis on engaging area targets, while the British focused on suppressing point targets. Not surprisingly, they both selected very different weapons prior to entering the war. The MG 42s wide cone of fire enabled it to suppress groups, while the bren guns narrow cone of fire enabled it to suppress individuals. Both were successful in fulfilling their combat role, but that brings another question to mind: Which philosophy (area targets vs point targets) is the correct one?
Before we can answer this dilemma, there is an important reality of the battlefield that must be borne in mind. Ever since the adoption of the rifled musket in the mid 1800s (and then the breech loading rifle in the late 1800s), armys have been forced to abandon close order formations and disperse themselves in order to survive weapons fire. The level of dispersion that occurred in this time frame is surprising. A book by Trevor Dupuy indicates that during the American civil war, armys were dispersed to the tune of 257 square meters per man. [1] During world war 1, the dispersion increased to 2475 square meters per man. During world war 2, the dispersion increased to 27,500 square meters per man. In other words, the amount of men in a given space (force densitys) decreased by a factor of 107 from the civil war to WW2. The trend towards increased dispersion has continued to accelerate. With that fact in mind, its hardly surprising that the number of bullets needed to kill an soldier has increased to such ridiculous highs.
Soldier of fortune magazine provides some figures on how much ammunition was expended per enemy killed in both world wars and korea. [2] Roughly 5000 rounds were fired for every enemy KIA in WW1, whereas 25,000 rounds were fired for every enemy KIA in WW2. In the Korean war, the ammunition expenditure went up to an incredible 100,000 rounds per KIA. Thanks to this data, we can safely conclude that there is a strong correlation between force densitys and rounds per KIA. The more dispersed the enemy is, the harder they are to suppress and to hit. It seems that the old German practise of having their machine guns fire at groups (area targets) was a better compromise, and more reflective of the type of battle a soldier was likely to encounter. They got more mileage out of their MG 42s than the British did with their bren guns. There is enough empirical evidence at hand to show that a machine gun with a wide cone of fire is what is really needed, so that infantry squads can engage area targets. Using machine guns to engage point targets is counterproductive, as that is a job better suited to the rifle.
Notes
[1] Numbers, Predictions and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles, by Trevor Dupuy.
[2] Soldier of Fortune Magazine Guide to Super Snipers, by Robert K. Brown.
Most sources on this matter will assert: ''The high rate of fire resulted from experiments with preceding weapons that concluded that since a soldier only has a short period of time to shoot at an enemy, it was imperative to fire the highest number of bullets possible to increase the likelihood of a hit... The disadvantage of applying this principle was that the weapon consumed exorbitant amounts of ammunition and quickly overheated its barrel, making sustained fire problematic.'' Or this: ''The Germans however came to the conclusion that a soldier in combat only fires when he sees the enemy and has but a few seconds to do so, taking this as a medium for all combatants they deemed it was he who fired an increased amount of bullets had an increased chance of a kill.'' But is there any truth to these explanations? An essay penned by our resident military guru, Jim Storr, suggest there is a completely different criterion that is not being accounted for.
Pondering the vast number of rounds per kill that are expended over the course of an engagement, like the notorious 250,000 bullets per KIA in Iraq and Afghanistan, Storr suggests that something is interfering with a modern armys ability to employ small arms fire. This goes beyond things like stress and return fire making our troops accuracy levels decreases. Indeed, even if we accept that most of the shots fired off in a battle are done only to suppress the enemy and not to kill him (since soldiers conceal themselves, they are hard to hit), this cannot explain how a quarter million rounds are expended just to kill one soldier: The only explanation is that the suppressing fire itself is being delivered in a fundamentally incorrect manner. Back in 1944, a study carried out by the army operational research group concluded that projectiles must not only pass within a certain proximity of a human combatant, but also arrive in a certain volume before he will feel threatened enough to take cover.
These are quantifiable data points that allow us to measure how much success a weapon and its user are having in a firefight. Armed with this knowledge, a group of soldiers from the British army were sent onto the firing range to train on a new piece of equipment, the live fire intelligent target. The results showed that most rounds fired missed by too wide a margin to drive an enemy to the ground, and that ammunition was expended at too high a rate to be sustainable for more than a few minutes. Thats consistent with what we have seen of other armys engaged in armed conflict: Infantrymen are not trained to excel at the role of suppression, nor do they have the proper weapons. The training problem can be solved by offering courses like those available at the TTECG, and giving sergeants stricter protocols for fire control. Of course, this still leaves us wondering what kind of small arm is best suited to suppression. If you thought it would be a belt fed, sustained fire weapon (with a quick change barrel) like the MG 42 or minimi, Storrs response will come as a disappointment:
''The British L86 magazinefed SA 80 Light Support Weapon (LSW), with its bipod, is extremely good at suppressing targets out to 500m or more... That is principally because it is accurate enough for almost every shot fired to contribute to suppression. The L110 (Minimi) Light Machine Gun (LMG) performs far worse in such trials. At best, only the first shot of a short burst passes close enough to suppress. However, subsequent shots in that burst go anything up to 6m wide of the mark at battlefield ranges.'' There is something very important that mr Storr neglected to consider, however. And that is the combat role that infantrymen have in mind for their machine guns. In WW2, the Germans placed a greater emphasis on engaging area targets, while the British focused on suppressing point targets. Not surprisingly, they both selected very different weapons prior to entering the war. The MG 42s wide cone of fire enabled it to suppress groups, while the bren guns narrow cone of fire enabled it to suppress individuals. Both were successful in fulfilling their combat role, but that brings another question to mind: Which philosophy (area targets vs point targets) is the correct one?
Before we can answer this dilemma, there is an important reality of the battlefield that must be borne in mind. Ever since the adoption of the rifled musket in the mid 1800s (and then the breech loading rifle in the late 1800s), armys have been forced to abandon close order formations and disperse themselves in order to survive weapons fire. The level of dispersion that occurred in this time frame is surprising. A book by Trevor Dupuy indicates that during the American civil war, armys were dispersed to the tune of 257 square meters per man. [1] During world war 1, the dispersion increased to 2475 square meters per man. During world war 2, the dispersion increased to 27,500 square meters per man. In other words, the amount of men in a given space (force densitys) decreased by a factor of 107 from the civil war to WW2. The trend towards increased dispersion has continued to accelerate. With that fact in mind, its hardly surprising that the number of bullets needed to kill an soldier has increased to such ridiculous highs.
Soldier of fortune magazine provides some figures on how much ammunition was expended per enemy killed in both world wars and korea. [2] Roughly 5000 rounds were fired for every enemy KIA in WW1, whereas 25,000 rounds were fired for every enemy KIA in WW2. In the Korean war, the ammunition expenditure went up to an incredible 100,000 rounds per KIA. Thanks to this data, we can safely conclude that there is a strong correlation between force densitys and rounds per KIA. The more dispersed the enemy is, the harder they are to suppress and to hit. It seems that the old German practise of having their machine guns fire at groups (area targets) was a better compromise, and more reflective of the type of battle a soldier was likely to encounter. They got more mileage out of their MG 42s than the British did with their bren guns. There is enough empirical evidence at hand to show that a machine gun with a wide cone of fire is what is really needed, so that infantry squads can engage area targets. Using machine guns to engage point targets is counterproductive, as that is a job better suited to the rifle.
Notes
[1] Numbers, Predictions and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles, by Trevor Dupuy.
[2] Soldier of Fortune Magazine Guide to Super Snipers, by Robert K. Brown.
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