Word: asteroidal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...science-fiction story by Arthur C. Clarke, an asteroid threatens Earth...
...subject so monumental calls for some unusual approaches. In one such departure, we commissioned science-fiction master Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to write a new story, set in the third millennium. His tale, The Hammer of God, about an asteroid that imperils the earth, is only the second piece of fiction ever to be published in TIME. (The first was a story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1969.) The 74-year-old British futurist, who has written more than 50 books, is often as prescient as he is prolific. Clarke has long warned about humankind...
...Creation, they will use nanotechnology to assemble devices atom by atom or molecule by molecule. His colleagues have already made motors smaller in diameter than a human hair. Drexler believes a bundle of nanorobots, weighing practically nothing, would be the perfect interstellar emissaries. Having arrived at a planet or asteroid around some distant star, perhaps in a solar sailship pushed to high speeds by a powerful laser beam from earth, they would go to work, antlike, building radio transmitters and other gear to report home for new instructions. They could also reproduce themselves and their ships in order to send...
...looked harmless enough: just another small asteroid, shaped so exactly like a peanut that the resemblance was almost comical. A few large impact craters, and hundreds of tiny ones, were scattered at random over its charcoal-gray surface. There were no visual clues to give any sense of scale, but Singh knew its dimensions by heart: 1,295 m maximum length, 456 m minimum width. Kali would fit easily into many city parks...
...wonder that, even now, most of humankind could still not believe that this modest asteroid was the instrument of doom. Or, as the Chrislamic Fundamentalists were calling it, "the Hammer...