The application of mathematics is a useful tool, not to be underestimated.
I was a little out of touch on 9/11, 20 miles up a 4wd trail past the nearest little mountain jumpoff town at 8700', then two days offtrail hiking with a 100+ pound pack over a 12k pass, exploring a remote area possibly untravelled by human presence in history, as access requires a roped 200' descent and egress requires reversing the same.
I didn't find out until two days afterwards, and didn't return home for two weeks afterward. In addition to the usual anxiety most of us felt, I also had to deal with a severe shortage of news, no radio, no cable, newspapers were normally flown in, etc.
On the 1400 mile cross country drive back, I realized something that responds directly to the points you raised. This country is awfully damn big, and nearly every corner of it is filled with the results of over two hundred years of significant effort on the parts of well over a billion people.
A handfull of terrorists simply cannot reverse all of that.
By using leverage and psychology, they can alter the norms of our daily life, but the real value that underlies our standard of living will remain, no matter what they do, with the possibly exception of them somehow gaining control of Russia's strategic nuclear assets, a highly unlikely scenario. They can't destroy the oil, or the cars or the cities, or the buildings or the people or the roads, not even a significant portion of them.
The effects you describe are very possible though, in the short, and possibly even the medium term. With the economy and perceived value of goods and services all tied to the value of the dollar, intermingled with the hope and prospects for a brighter future, panic and terror could well cause temporary turbulence in the flow of our daily routines for a while.
Perhaps the worst outcome they could attempt to achieve would be to interrupt the production of food on a grand scale, but close family members, one with a doctorate and over 40 US patents in the agricultural chemical field, and another with his doctorate in molecular bio-chemistry assure me that this simply isn't practicably possible on any scale approaching significance.
As you and others, including the terrorists themselves, note, the weakest area they can target is our financial markets, forcing our own fears to compound and multiply the effects of their attack. As you also note, extreme turbulence can disorder the turbulence process itself, forcing it to behave according to non-orderly expressions, however, turbulence, in and of itself, is simply a disorderly flow, and regardless of the apparant contradiction offered by the second law of thermodynamics and popular semantics, sustained turbulence is mathematically forbidden without the continuous application of external energy.
Unless the terrorists have invented perpetual motion, another cosmic no-no, the system, regardless of provocation, will return to an equilibrium (non-turbulent) state. Given the fact that they cannot destroy the base wealth of the United States, much less the world, the odds are exceedingly geared to produce a resulting steady state post attack not much dissimilar to what we have now.
As I'm sure you are aware, there are many variables involved, but I consider some to be self-perpetuating under the right conditions, making further public discussion counter-productive.
In most scenarios, steady leadership, combined with the base global wealth, make attempts at major dislocation or change through leveraged or psychological attacks, against a country with the real capacity to destroy a significant portion of the earth's surface, a mathematically guaranteed losing proposition.
Agreed. In the long-run.
ping