Word: earths
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unobtainium is not important, and despite Fox's objections, he never explains in the movie what makes unobtainium worth the trouble of interstellar travel. But the answer to that mystery is that the substance's room-temperature superconducting properties make it the key to cheap power generation back on Earth, where all the oil has run out. Unobtainium is crucial to running ships like the ISV Venture Star, which delivers humans to Pandora. The irony is that the more unobtainium humans mine on Pandora, the more they will be able to travel there. It's a devastating feedback loop...
...modern consumer technology. Take the iPhone: its form gives no clue as to its function or who made it or where it came from. There are no screws. You can't hack it. It's perfect, but it might as well have been made by aliens and fallen to Earth in an asteroid...
...coyotes have loped off, and the rattlesnakes have crawled under the construction trailers for shade and safety. Bulldozers have scraped away the mesquite to make a board-flat rectangle 10,000 ft. by 200 ft. Workers have begun putting down layers of gravel, packed earth, asphalt and concrete 42 in. thick to form a runway. The age of space tourism is here...
...Together, they will carry two pilots and six passengers to an altitude of 70 miles - the edge of space. Passengers will enjoy five minutes of eerie silence and weightlessness (floating somersaults are allowed) and 1,000-mile views in all directions before a half-hour glide back to earth. Tickets cost $200,000, and 300 people have already signed...
...former British provinces and princely states threaded together into a federal republic. Some of its states remain huge and unwieldy - for example, the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, with its estimated 190 million people, would be virtually tied with Brazil as the fifth most populous country on earth but it would also possess 8% of the world's population under the global poverty line. With a country of India's size and diversity - as well as poverty - there is logic in having smaller states. "It will in fact strengthen [governance] through economic and administrative convenience," says Delhi-based political...