Brickman100 said:
Right, I've been wanting to try this one for a while, so here we go. I've seen a lot of "There is vs 100 superhuman warriors from the future" type threads around, and I wanted to try one of my own, but just a little different.
Here is the situation :
You get a warning from the radio telling you that a 747 filled with passengers is headed directly towards the Hoover/Boulder Dam in northern Colorado ,due to a hijacking by terrorists, a 9/11 situation if you will. If it hits the Dam, it will destroy everything in its path, causing incalculable damage and loss of life. You also have the option of shooting it down, but then you will have to face the consequences of the loss of nearly 600 people, and the criminal impacts of that ,as well as the moral implications. The other option is open to you. You have access to anything in America's disposal,be that military or whatever else, bearing in mind that the plane will hit in less than 90 minutes. It is completely your decision on what happens. What would you do?
Easy, you shoot it down. We already did this during 9/11. The fairy tale is that the passengers in the third jet rallied and tried to stop the terrorists which caused the plane to lose control, but according to most of what I've read we destroyed it before it got to DC.
Understand that 9/11 was a decapitation attempt on the US goverment, one of the reasons why I am a lot more militant about it even now than most people are (especially left wingers). If it had succeeded it had a reasonable chance of bringing the US goverment down, and causing unparalleled chaos throughout the world. The targets were the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Washington DC (the target being the Capitol or the White House is unknown).
While emotional, such desicians are pretty easy, it's called "morality by the numbers". In cases like this you choose the lesser of two evils, the target hit here (whatever it is) is going to do more damage and probably kill more people (even if over time) than the 600 or so passengers lost on the plane. The desician is obvious for any leader who belongs making such a desician.
The thing is that "morality by the numbers" gets harder the bigger the numbers get, or if it somehow results in absolute destruction or genocide. Choosing to say kill ten million people to save a billion is the same basic thing, but it's increasingly harder to "pull the trigger" so to speak. One of the problems with big desicians is that it's human nature to hope for some magical solution to arrive and delay rather than doing what is nessicary.
There are various science fiction novels that get into the concept of "ethical genocide", heck even "Mass Effect" gets into this with the Rakni to some extent. The idea that wiping out something like Aliens Xenomorphs, or Starcraft's Zerg in their entirety is okay (or is it?). You can see this issue extended in some of the themes in series like the "Man - Kzin wars" (though I believe it never actually comes to that in the canon, though I believe in Star Trek the Kzin were mentioned to have been killed to a man in the distant past at one point as a sort of nod to Niven... it's been nerd fodder for a while), or a more "recent" book called "The Dark Wing" featuring a group of fanatical bird-men who surrender and periodically rebuild and attack humans to kill us all off. These elements are typically addressed in science fiction to of course deal with the contreversy of dealing with them in real life, where deciding to wipe out a culture on our own planet becomes something else entirely since we'd be talking about targeting our own species rather than aliens.
The bottom line is that it's not an easy thing to think about, but the answer is obvious.