Word: planeteers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...each and are traveling through the Milky Way at vector coordinate 5.88, how long will it take for them to reach Earth? Should the aliens conquer Paris, London, Moscow and New York themselves, or delegate these tasks to a better-trained corp of omnivorous, rock-eating arthropods from the planet Grock? Please be prepared to comment on these case questions during the informational session, where you will meet employees recently graduated from such schools as Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth and the Alpha-Centauri Mutant Teachers' College...
...globe settle down for a romantic cascade of shooting stars, scientists and corporations scramble to save their satellites from the biggest Earth-bound bombardment the space age has ever seen. As you read this, tiny fragments from the Comet Tempel-Tuttle's tail are whizzing toward our unsuspecting planet at a dizzying 155,000 mph. You, of course, are protected by many miles of flammable, oxygen-rich atmosphere. The satellite your pager uses -- not to mention your phone company, your cable company and your government -- isn't so lucky. Our entire orbital army, more than 600 satellites strong, risks being...
During those 32 years, however, something has changed. None of the handful of satellites orbiting the globe in 1966 was hit by a Leonid. But today the planet is circled by a bewildering variety of spacecraft--about 600 in all--that have become indispensable to modern society: relaying phone calls, e-mail and faxes; monitoring hurricanes, terrorist activities and crop yields. A collision with a meteor could damage or disable any one of them. That is why NASA, the Air Force and the Russian space agency are directing a wholesale reorientation of their fleets of orbiting spacecraft...
...fact that there are more total minutes in the long intervals than there are in the short intervals. The problem comes when Aczel extends this argument to the discussion of life in the universe. He says that if "God creates you and randomly sends you...to live on some planet...a longer-living civilization has a higher chance of receiving you than one that has existed for a short time," and uses this observation, in concert with the fact that we all happen to have been "received" by Earth, to conclude that, "It is very likely that, as galactic civilizations...
...equation, a description of the factors involved in calculating the number of civilizations in the galaxy capable of communicating with each other, is useful in concept. But the equation is not a very practical tool for performing actual calculations because its factors include numbers like the percentage of planets in their stars' habitable zones that contain all of the environmental conditions necessary to life. Any estimates of these numbers that we make range from extremely rough approximations to wild guesses. Aczel, however, does not even attempt to give values for all of the variables in his calculation. Instead, he gives...