Word: asteroid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Asteroids are familiar ground for many fictional characters, including Antoine de Saint-Exupery's charming "Little Prince," who lives on asteroid B-612 and cleans out its two active volcanoes with a plumber's helper. But real-life spacemen have largely ignored the small, airless planets in their race to reach the moon and Mars...
Very large near-approach asteroids are surely scarce, but Kohler estimates that between 10 million and 10 billion objects 30 ft. to 300 ft. in diameter pass each year within 20 million miles of the earth. A good number of them probably come much closer, perhaps within several hundred thousand miles. Kohler urges that a careful search be made for these visitors with special electronic telescopes. If an asteroid promises to make a close approach to the earth in the near future, he urges, it should become a prospective target for space explorers...
...microfilms of all the books in the Library of Congress. A fully developed unit of macrolife would have rocket propulsion to enable it to move at will around the solar system. It would be able to live independently almost anywhere in space, but its normal habitat would be the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter where it could feed upon the mineral riches of the asteroids...
Feeding on Asteroids. As Cole envisions things, the human cells inside the unit would be both male and female, and they would multiply in the normal human way. But the unit itself would multiply asexually, like an amoeba. As its human population increased, its internal machine shops would turn out parts for a new unit, using ingested asteroid material. After 40 or 50 years a fresh unit of macrolife would separate from its parent and look for a place in the sunlight and an asteroid to feed...