Word: millennia
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...Greek word for the ordered universe, the antithesis of chaos. It is an apt choice. Cosmos is nothing less than Sagan's attempt to make sense out of what is for many people the hopelessly baffling world of 20th century science. To unfold his story he roves through two millennia of scientific progress, often shuttling back and forth over the centuries like some Wellsian time traveler. He travels the earth as well. One moment he is seated in a café on the Aegean island of Samos, home of Pythagoras and Aristarchus, explaining the first stirrings of Greek scientific prowess...
Even in the millennia of their history the Chinese had never encountered a presidential advance party, especially one disciplined by the monomaniacal obsession of the Nixon White House with public relations. When I warned Chou En-lai that China had survived barbarian invasions before but had never encountered advance men, it was only partly a joke...
...Imagine, if you will, a land in which carpetbaggers swarmed not for a decade or so but for millennia and you will come to understand just one aspect of a Poland stomped upon with metronomic tedium and regularity by the French, the Swedes, the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and possessed by even such greedy incubuses as the Turks. Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories. Pride in ancestry...
...plowing. For millennia, farmers have turned over the land with plows before tilling it, cultivating it and putting in seed. Now, machines are available that combine several operations in a process called minimum tillage. One machine, on which Garst and a partner hold the patent, cuts a V-shaped furrow in unplowed land and simultaneously drops in seed. Says Garst: "In a sense, we have gone back to the pointed stick...
...sleep? How are galaxies formed? What is consciousness? Why does a species become extinct? The problem that the experts had simply in formulating these questions is perhaps best expressed by Mathematician C.J.S. Clarke: "It is far from clear just what it is we are ignorant of: despite millennia of attempts, no scientific language yet exists for turning one's vague feeling of mystery into sufficiently concrete questions...