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July 18, 2005 Let's start with a couple of important facts: (1) The world is wildly overpopulated. A large number of people (like many of the Muslims in the world, and also many others) will never be able to afford a decent standard of living, or jobs with satisfying advancement possibilities. For example, although the coastal cities of China are doing pretty well, the vast interior has more unemployed people than the whole employed population of the U.S. This worldwide overpopulation is bound to lead to legions of angry men without any positive outlet for their energies. (If I were one of them, I'm sure I'd be causing some kind of trouble, somewhere!) (2) There is way too much weaponry and explosives easily available in the world. Putting those two facts together, the awful events in each days news should not be surprising. We only have a limited time before the relatively small disasters get replaced by bigger ones, involving nuclear waste or anthrax spores, etc. Let's allow the present bad news to wake us up and change our priorities. Instead of putting such huge efforts into rap "music," improved iPods, bigger Hollywood extravaganzas, more SUVs and civilian Hum-vees, and similar frivolities, we need a huge national effort to do the following: (A) Develop explosives detectors. Maybe a nuclear magnetic resonance machine like an MRI scanner could be made to detect a tri-nitrate microwave "signature" over a reasonable distance. Of course, there is research going on for such things right now, but we need much, much more, like a modern-day "Manhattan Project." (B) Let's draft new soldiers for the sole purpose of sealing certain porous borders. There's Iraq/Syria, and Afganistan/Pakistan, and even Mexico/Texas. (For example, if we don't stop the enormous influx of Mexicans, all our city hospital emergency rooms will soon be overloaded, which is already starting to happen. But there are plenty of other such problems.) Back in the Korean War, if we had bombed the Korean ends of the Yalu River bridges, the whole war would have ended quickly. In Vietnam, if we had occupied the Ho Chi Minh trail in Cambodia and Laos, we would have won --- then there would not have been the Hippie-style revolution at home (which is still reverberating among our young people and many of our college professors today). Let's make lots of little sensors, maybe solar powered units similar to RFID tags buried in the ground, to detect people sneaking over the boundaries. But it will take a lot of soldiers to police the perimeters. Either the present terrorist bombings will wake us up, or a much louder explosion will, quite a lot closer to home. ------------ About the author: Dan Shanefield is a retired engineering prof, who worked at Bell Labs and then at Rutgers University. He wrote the book "Industrial Electronics for Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians". Visit his website or email Dan Shanefield: shanefield@ieee.org Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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