Word: distantly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DARK MEANINGS still reverberate like distant thunder from the last millennial passage. There was no widespread panic at the approach of the year 1000, as some writers have claimed, but an inescapable note of Armageddon was in the air. Men pondered over the text of the last days in the book of Revelation: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea" (Revelation...
...this sexual fantasy on for size: author Howard Rheingold, who writes about the you-are-there technology known as virtual reality, predicts that consenting adults in the not too distant future will be able to enjoy sex over the telephone. First they will slip into undergarments lined with sensors and miniature actuators. Then they will dial their partner and, while whispering endearments, fondle each other over long-distance lines. For those who prefer something tamer, Nobel physicist Arno Penzias believes that in the 21st century it will be possible to play Ping-Pong (or any other sport) with phantasms that...
...FUTURE, a destination so close that it is arriving every second, is somehow always too distant to be clearly seen. That has not stopped generations of would-be forecasters, from Nostradamus to Alvin Toffler, from squinting in that direction. But prognosticating has always been a difficult, if not perilous, undertaking. No less a person than Henry Adams, one of America's most perceptive thinkers and historians, declared in 1903: "My figures coincide in setting 1950 as the year that the world must go smash." Close, but no prize...
...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...
...once have been considered luxuries have become staples of everyday consumption. Medicine has reduced infant mortality and conquered many of the diseases that formerly struck down people in their prime. A vast increase in life expectancy dramatizes the contrast between our world and that of our ancestors in the distant past...