Word: planet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After a few decades of familiarization and exploration had established that there was no indigenous Martian life, humans might be ready to undertake the ultimate real estate-development project: the greening of Mars. The first step, according to one recent study, would be to warm the planet by releasing large amounts of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. These gases would act like a greenhouse, trapping the sun's heat. As the planet warmed, the polar caps would begin to melt, releasing water vapor and carbon dioxide into the Martian air, thickening it and increasing the greenhouse effect. Eventually the permafrost, where...
...Engines of Creation, they will use 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...
...panic, not even much interest, as the millennium approached in the final months of 999. For what terrors could the apocalypse hold for a continent that was already shrouded in darkness? Rather Europe -- illiterate, diseased and hungry -- seemed grimly resigned to desperation and impoverishment. It was one of the planet's most unpromising corners, the Third World...
...science the demon that will enable man to destroy the planet and himself, we ask, or the means by which a new generation can correct its forebears' mistakes? Should we learn more about the brain and how it works? What if that leads to chilling discoveries about mind control? Should humans live longer? Then the whole world will face the problem now besetting industrial nations of ever more retirees consuming rather than producing wealth. As the coming century or two brings the emergence of a world middle class, where do we commit the resources of science and medicine -- to marginal...
...with a force and frequency that would turn this stately march of progress into a long-distance, free-for-all sprint. Thrust into this race, the children of the 20th century would witness more change in their daily existence and environment than anyone else who had ever walked the planet...