The Dangers Of Patents As Weapons: Fill & Download for Free

Multiple nuclear powered submarines and unexploded nuclear bombs have already sunk or been lost in the oceans. Some of them haven’t been found. Think about that. The radiation released is so small and the oceans are so big that even with exotic radiation detection technology that can find single atoms in a salmon, we can’t find a whole nuclear powered submarine on the bottom of the ocean somewhere.Fears of the dangers of radiation are massively overblown. These fears serve a purpose, so they are assisted and not corrected. The only foreign forces that can seriously threaten the USA are those with nuclear weapons. We desperately want to limit nuclear weapons to our small club (USA, Russia, China, France, UK) but the club keeps expanding to include Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, … We’ll lie and fail to correct erroneous, fearful thoughts if those lies and fears will help slow the spread of nuclear technical knowledge and potentially possession of nuclear weapons. This is why patently false ideas like nuclear winter and the dangers of a radiation plume from Fukushima propagate without correction.

Build?Yes.Fuel and fly?There is an insane amount of red tape involved, along with a lot of costs, and there are a small number of locations from which you’d be able to launch, and a smaller number of locations from which you’d be allowed to launch.Consider getting involved in an amateur rocketry group as a first step.I have a friend who helps fly rockets out of the Stanford SSI (Student Space Initiative). You can learn more about that here: Stanford SSIAs a purely practical matter, they have people who handle all the red tape, and access to a launch site.They also have sponsorship from companies like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, as well as Northrop Gruman and Blue Origin which can help with both technical expertise, and with paying for the equipment, government contacts for greasing the skids on access to launch facilities and so on.The overall climate isn’t right for a lot of this type of thing.While this may seem like a strange thing to say, you are unlikely to get a lot of support for building a system like the DC-X, and then equipping it with a patent-violating linear aerospike engine to drastically reduce the launch weight and therefore overall costs.Maybe Dubai would like a space program?If so, they will probably want someone with a track record.Personally, with near unlimited funds, and a country where the patents wouldn’t be enforced, I’d likely be building 5 legged DC-X systems, and violating the crap out of a bunch of patents.Realize that cheap access to space is threatening to a lot of people.Very specifically, it’s possible to get the costs down to the point where you are mostly paying for maintenance, fuel, and engine hours, and the cost of something that could lift you to an LTO (Lunar Transfer Orbit) used would be about what John Travolta paid for his Boeing 707.There is a problem with this.In an old science fiction novel, there was a McGuffin (a “magical” technology designed to move the story plot forward) which involved creating a time viewer, and viewing the dinosaurs, and the effort was all about pushing as far back into the past as you could possibly go with the viewers.You could literally view any place on earth, so spatial resolution wasn’t a problem, but pushing past the Cretaceous was a big problem.The further you went into the past, the higher the energy costs, and the more fuzzy the equipment, and it was therefore all very expensive and highly regulated — something governments did.But… what happens when you look closer to home?Eventually, the characters realized this, and realized that they could look tens of years in the past instead, and see that child who died in the accident, while they were still alive, instead, and there was a great danger in getting emotionally lost in the near-past instead of the present, and living your life.But then what if you set it for a fraction of a second in the past?Of course, you could spy on anyone.So the danger to cheap access to space is that people will look closer to home.A terrorist group could afford a Boeing 707.It’s actually surprising to me that they aren’t packing private jet with high explosives and piloting them into things already.With access to space, though…A transport hold full of ceramic coated metal telephone poles is essentially the equivalent of having tactical nuclear weapons.See: Kinetic bombardment — AKA “Rods From God”.That’s the real danger to cheap access to space.And that’s why everything is so highly regulated.

Same reason people in real life think these shouldn't exist:Tsar BombaZemo is echoing real-world arguments about WMD proliferation. In fact, all weapons are only as good as their users: a gun has no will of its own, it does not care whether it is used to protect or to murder.And as weapons go, the super soldier serum is a particularly troubling one, because it is actively mind-altering, a problem even its own inventor noted in Captain America: The First Avenger:“The serum amplifies everything that is inside. So, good becomes great. Bad becomes worse.”[1]Zemo mentions in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that he respected Captain Rogers, but it clearly didn’t change his mind, and for good reason: you can’t be lucky enough to find your ideal candidate every time. I’m not as pessimistic as he clearly is about human nature but I’m realistic enough to admit that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and most importantly, power attracts the corrupt. Which is a large part of the reason why Steve opposed the Sokovia Accords back in Captain America: Civil War: he believed it would only be a matter of time before somebody tried to use the power of the Avengers to achieve earthly political objectives instead of protecting the planet from rogue supers.In essence, Zemo is making the same argument about the serum that the United Federation of Planets does about genetic augments in Star Trek:“For every Julian Bashir that can be created, there’s a Khan Singh waiting in the wings.”[2]So, whether or not you agree with his actions, Zemo does have a point: like any weapon, the super soldier serum is as dangerous to its creator and to innocent bystanders as it is to its intended targets, and there’s no guarantee it will always be used wisely.However, this is only one side of the argument. One might argue in Sam and Bucky’s place that Zemo is essentially trying to put the genie back in the bottle. As Dr. Wilfred Nagel shows in the series, it’s always possible to duplicate research: in the 1850s, two inventors on opposite sides of the Atlantic independently developed similar methods for refining iron into steel within a couple years of each other (what became known as the Bessemer process after the British inventor), to the point where there were accusations of patent infringement in both directions.[3]Furthermore, just because power corrupts and attracts the corrupt, does not necessarily mean the non-corrupt should avoid it: in fact one may consider it prudent to acquire power as a defense against the corrupt. This is in essence the calculus a state makes when funding a military,* and one of the arguments used by gun rights advocates in the United States: if few people have weapons, then those people have all the power. The cat’s out of the bag: superpowered people are now a fact of life in the MCU, and bringing down a rogue super usually takes another super, as with the aphorism that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Or see this example:“You said yourself, Doctor, they’d go back to the stars and tell others about the Earth. I’m sorry, Doctor, but you’re not here all the time. You come and go. It happened today. Mister Llewellyn and the Major, they were murdered. They died right in front of me while you were sleeping. In which case we have to defend ourselves.“[4]Now, I’m not arguing either way: proliferation on Earth is a valid concern, and so is the probable reality of future offworld threats like the Accusers, Dormammu, Ego, Thanos, and Thor’s entire rogues gallery. The people of MCU Earth are going to have to figure this one out on their own, and I suspect the answer is probably somewhere in the middle: police proliferation of supers and also have some of your own for emergencies.* Costa Rica being a notable exception: they decided that 1) there wasn’t anybody they actually needed a military to deter, and 2) in their part of the world the military tended to be more dangerous to its own state than to their enemies.Footnotes[1] Captain America: The First Avenger[2] The Deep Space Nine Transcripts[3] 1. The Kelly - Bessemer Process[4] The Doctor Who Transcripts