Word: planetful
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...Recently, NASA released a report claiming the robotic arm on its Mars Polar Lander was a success. Last week F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., chairman of the House Committee on Science, ridiculed the report, pointing out that the whole contraption crashed on the red planet before the robotic arm was ever deployed. Was NASA trying to pull a fast...
NIGHTMARE SCENARIO Self-replication is the best way to build a few trillion nanobots in a hurry: each one makes two more, and each of those makes two and so on. But if they don't stop, the entire planet could rapidly be reduced to a teeming mass of robots. Nanotechnologists plan to program their tiny creations to stop reproducing after a certain point. But it takes only one rogue self-replicator to cause a disaster. If you thought computer viruses were a problem...
...high tech does not stay high tech forever. Nor does it march in a straight line. The unanticipated and unintended consequences of new technology can be as significant as its promise, especially if we proceed without comprehending the scope of technology's impact on humanity and the planet...
...daily lives, high-tech experiences are increasingly replacing low-tech ones, and if we manage to design every square inch of the planet, then every experience will be a simulated one. Nature museums are cropping up in urban centers, a clear signal that the environment is in as much need of preservation as are arrowheads, shields and shuttle looms. Simulation has become the most popular experience in modern American culture. A North American child may play his snowboarding video four times a week, but he whizzes down a mountain only four days a year...
...long run, however, low tech may endure. Terry Erwin, a research entomologist and curator at the Smithsonian Institution, thinks in terms of millions of years. Humans may be the most successful species on the planet after the insects, Erwin says, but we have triggered a global species extinction that rivals those caused by ice ages, floods and killer asteroids--with a difference. "Those extinctions were more or less local, zonal or regional," says Erwin. "The present trend, the so-called sixth massive extinction process, is worldwide and atmospheric, totally pervasive...