Word: comets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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WHAT'S THE WORLD COMING TO? FIRST, ASTROPHYSIcists said comets killed the dinosaurs. Then they implicated asteroids in numerous other mass extinctions throughout the earth's history, setting the stage for the awful news in October that the comet Swift-Tuttle might crash into the planet in the year...
EVERY AUGUST THE EARTH PASSES THROUGH THE orbital path of Comet Swift-Tuttle. If the comet ever happened to be there, the 10-km-wide (6-mile) chunk of ice and rock could slam into the planet, carving an enormous crater, generating tidal waves and throwing up a worldwide pall of dust that could block sunlight for months. Plants would be largely wiped out, and so would many species that ultimately depend on plants for food -- including, perhaps, the human race. Just such a disaster, many scientists believe, killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. A smaller strike...
Luckily, planet and comet have never been in the same place at the same time. The only visible effect of the crossed paths is the annual Perseid meteor shower, caused when lingering comet dust burns up in the earth's atmosphere. But humanity may not be so lucky for long: there is a chance that the next time Swift-Tuttle comes around, probably in the year 2126, it will fall to earth. The odds are small -- 10,000 to 1 against -- according to the International Astronomical Union's Brian Marsden. But the downside is so great that Marsden has urged...
...sense, the comet of Limbaugh's rise is the traditional American success story, rewritten for the Reagan-Bush era. Less than a decade ago, he was out of radio and out of work; he was fired from five jobs, broke twice. Now he is rich and famous; this June he was an overnight guest at the White House, and the President carried Limbaugh's bag. His juicy fulminations against "feminazis" (militant pro-abortionists), "commie libs" (pretty much anyone to the left of Archduke Ferdinand) and "environmentalist wackos" (tree huggers) have won him the admiration and courtship of many...
...world no longer has the leisure of the two centuries Mauritius took to develop a conservation ethic. In the past, natural forces shaped the environment. Now, unless a new round of volcanism erupts worldwide or a comet courses in from outer space, human activities will govern the destiny of earth's ecosystems. It may soon be within human power to produce the republics of grass and insects that writer Jonathan Schell believed would be the barren legacy of nuclear war. If humanity fails to seek an accord with nature, population control may be imposed involuntarily by the environment itself...