Word: asteroidal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Freshman Seminars typically address topics not covered by traditional department courses. I took one which studied a single novel, Don Quixote. Other seminars have concerned themselves with whether the earth is more likely to be destroyed by nuclear war or an asteroid collision, as well as the last spoken words of great men. One might defend the current system by arguing that first-years, more than other students, will benefit from these non-traditional classes. This argument, it seems to me, has its logic entirely backwards...
...whether life on Earth was a fluke or a foregone conclusion. But most biologists cautiously lean toward the latter. Life on this planet emerged surprisingly quickly--as early as a few hundred million years after Earth formed. At the time, the planet was intensely volcanic, with the occasional leftover asteroid screaming in every few million years--yet primitive life forms persisted and flourished...
...this is right, there can be no directionality, no innate drive forward; in particular, no push toward consciousness and intelligence. Should Earth be struck by an asteroid, destroying all higher life-forms, intelligent beings, still less humanoids, would almost certainly not arise next time around...
...longer journey, the spacecraft made good use of its time. It shot pictures, calibrated its instruments, conducted scientific observations of Venus and Earth during its flybys and, among other achievements, confirmed the existence of a huge impact crater on the backside of the moon. Passing twice through the asteroid belt, it snapped the first closeup images of the asteroid Gaspra and discovered the first asteroidal moon, a tiny clump (later named Dactyl) orbiting the asteroid Ida. Then in July 1994 it shot pictures of the fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunging into Jupiter, capturing images of the far-side...
...data also fill in one more piece of the puzzle of planetary formation. Astronomers have observed dusty disks surrounding many nearby stars, and the laws of gravity suggest that sooner or later the dust should coagulate into bigger and bigger pieces-comet- and asteroid-size at least, and very likely into chunks the size of planets...