Word: decay
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...what if, in spite of the second law of thermodynamics, there can be systematic progress alongside decay? For those who hope for a deeper meaning or purpose beneath physical existence, the presence of extraterrestrial life-forms would provide a spectacular boost, implying that we live in a universe that is in some sense getting better and better rather than worse and worse...
Gingrich envisions a promised land--an America that may lie just over the horizon, in his cherished Third Wave Information Age, where traditional values connect to the future. He hopes to get to a place beyond poverty and violence and moral decay by leaving behind the welfare state and the deadening, blockheaded bureaucratic mind of Washington: a renewed civilization, says Newt--Norman Rockwell in the 21st century, a wholesome Utopia. Newt's destination has the refulgence of a never-never land--that is, an ideal. But in America, ideals have always been a necessary and efficient form of national energy...
...components like collagen, notes Knoll, animals simply cannot grow large. But for most of earth's history, the production of oxygen through photosynthesis - the metabolic alchemy that allowed primordial algae to turn carbon dioxide, water and sunlight into energy - was almost perfectly balanced by oxygen-depleting processes, especially organic decay. Indeed, the vast populations of algae that smothered the Precambrian oceans generated tons of vegetative debris, and as bacteria decomposed this slimy detritus, they performed photosynthesis in reverse, consuming oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that traps heat and helps warm the planet...
...However tattered it may be, the notion of a global human commonwealth is integral to the postwar world and its challenges. As a new century nears, the invention of 1945 may gain a new lease on life in tackling such genuinely globe-girdling issues as energy supplies, counterterrorism, environmental decay and drug trafficking, as well as disease control-jobs no single country can manage. Says Eban: "In the end, the idea of world community is going to succeed. Therefore, the U.N. should dig in its heels and bide its time. The idea of living without a unitary framework of relations...
Slot machines and cultural decay do not go hand in hand, dozens of Native American leaders said Saturday at "Raising the Stakes," a Harvard conference on Native American gaming sponsored by Cultural Survival...