Richard Dawkins - Religion's Misguided Missiles & The Improbability of God
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2024-11-24
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Religion's misguided missiles
Promise a young man that death is not the end and he will willingly cause
disaster
The following Richard Dawkins essay appeared in the popular U.K. news
website,The Guardian on September 15, 2001, four days after the World Trade
Center terrorist attack.
A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a
jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot
discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York
skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.
That is precisely what a modern "smart missile" can do. Computer
miniaturisation has advanced to the point where one of today's smart missiles
could be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together with
instructions to home in on the north tower of the World Trade Centre. Smart
missiles of this sophistication are possessed by the United States, as we learned
in the Gulf war, but they are economically beyond ordinary terrorists and
scientifically beyond theocratic governments. Might there be a cheaper and
easier alternative?
In the second world war, before electronics became cheap and miniature, the
psychologist BF Skinner did some research on pigeon-guided missiles. The
pigeon was to sit in a tiny cockpit, having previously been trained to peck keys in
such a way as to keep a designated target in the centre of a screen. In the
missile, the target would be for real.
The principle worked, although it was never put into practice by the US
authorities. Even factoring in the costs of training them, pigeons are cheaper and
lighter than computers of comparable effectiveness. Their feats in Skinner's
boxes suggest that a pigeon, after a regimen of training with colour slides, really
could guide a missile to a distinctive landmark at the southern end of Manhattan
island. The pigeon has no idea that it is guiding a missile. It just keeps on
pecking at those two tall rectangles on the screen, from time to time a food
reward drops out of the dispenser, and this goes on until... oblivion.
Pigeons may be cheap and disposable as on-board guidance systems, but
there's no escaping the cost of the missile itself. And no such missile large
enough to do much damage could penetrate US air space without being
intercepted. What is needed is a missile that is not recognised for what it is until
too late. Something like a large civilian airliner, carrying the innocuous markings
of a well-known carrier and a great deal of fuel. That's the easy part. But how do
you smuggle on board the necessary guidance system? You can hardly expect
the pilots to surrender the left-hand seat to a pigeon or a computer.
How about using humans as on-board guidance systems, instead of pigeons?
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分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：9 页
大小：113.24KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-11-24
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