Word: planet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with the birth of the Debra Winger character and ends after her death. Broadcast News, his delicately furious 1987 comedy about network infotainment, opens when the star newsfolk are kids and ends seven years after the climax. His ultimate film would be the life story of everyone on this planet -- painful emotional reality, but with great jokes. As a writer and a guy, he can imagine nothing worse than abandonment. "Until recently," he observes, "just saying that word made my legs shake. And even now they're not so steady...
...years or so. But if last week is any indication of winters to come, it might be more to the point to start worrying about the next Ice Age instead. After all, human-induced warming is still largely theoretical, while ice ages are an established part of the planet's history. The last one ended about 10,000 years ago; the next one -- for there will be a next one -- could start tens of thousands of years from now. Or tens of years. Or it may have already started...
...into ice ages, with average temperatures in parts of the Northern Hemisphere falling 15 degrees over hundreds or thousands of years. During long, frigid winters and short, cool summers, snow piled up much faster than it could melt, and mile-thick sheets of ice gradually covered much of the planet's land surface. After 100,000 years or so, scientists believed, the glaciers made a dignified retreat, stayed put for about 10,000 years and then began to grow again...
...explored the landscape of the mind, or consciousness, as he explored the physical landscape of the planet. And then . . . for whatever reason, by 1985 Crichton was back working; by 1987 he was into his most solidly satisfying marriage (to Anne-Marie Martin); by 1988 he was a deliriously happy father (her name is Taylor); and by 1993 the money he was earning by his wits rolled up in 18-wheelers (the film rights to Disclosure went for $3.5 million...
...human space flight? Diminished, perhaps, but not eliminated. Interplanetary spacecraft can be shrunk and adapted to serve both science and industry. Take the Pathfinder probe. Costing a reasonable $150 million, this ; robotic land rover will parachute to the surface of Mars in 1997 and roam around sampling the planet's atmosphere and geology. Says Larry Dumas, deputy director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, where Pathfinder is being developed: "You're getting back to a scale of spacecraft that we really haven't seen since the early days of the space program." And the rover technology has already...