Word: distantly
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...affluence for all now appears unlikely, even in the distant future. The emergence of a global economy, far from eliminating poverty, has widened the gap between rich and poor nations. The revolution of rising expectations may not be self-generating, as we had thought. It may even be reversible. Famine and plague have returned to large parts of the world. Poverty is spilling over into the developed nations from the Third World. Desperate migrants pour into our cities, swelling the vast army of the homeless, unemployed, illiterate, drug-ridden, derelict and effectively disfranchised. Their presence strains existing resources...
...century to come, and the centuries to follow, will be complex, fast- paced and turbulent. Human beings everywhere have learned to live with, even thrive on, explosive increases in the volume of knowledge, the capacities of technology, the potential for travel, the electronic immediacy of once distant cultures. Change has become almost addictive, a jolt to energy and creativity...
...wind slowly faded. Suddenly, he was back in this cabin aboard the orbital tug Goliath, commanding the 100-person team of Operation ATLAS the most critical mission in the history of space exploration. Toby, and the stepmothers and stepfathers of his extended family, remained behind on a distant world which Singh could never revisit. Decades in space -- and neglect of the mandatory zero-G exercises -- had so weakened him that he could now walk only on the Moon and Mars. Gravity had exiled him from the planet of his birth...
...more moments, he delayed facing his awesome responsibility. Then he sighed and removed the neural-input cap that fitted snugly over his skull and had enabled him to call up his distant past. Like all spacers, Captain Singh belonged to the "Bald Is Beautiful" school, if only because wigs were a nuisance in zero gravity. The social historians were still staggered by the fact that one invention, the portable "Brainman," could make bare heads the norm within a single decade. Not even quick-change skin coloring, or the lens- corrective laser shaping which had abolished eyeglasses, had made such...
Several factors made the Age of Exploration possible. Medieval cartographers piously placed Jerusalem at the center of the earth. But in the 15th century, Western scholars rediscovered Ptolemy's Geography, with its maps of a semispheric earth that (more or less) accurately located such distant places as Iceland and Ceylon. Improvements in rigging enabled the construction of larger, more maneuverable ships with both square-rigged and fore-and-aft sails. The development of the quadrant (an Arabic invention) and magnetic compass (possibly from China) made navigation more accurate; the stern- fastened rudder made ship handling easier...