Word: planetful
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FIASCO ON THE RED PLANET...
...GalaxyQuest's cast drag themselves numbly to conventions, where geeks in space suits assault them with technical queries. Turns out a few of the dweebs are actual aliens, who believe the show's actors are just the astral heroes needed to rebuff an attack on their planet. There's a bit of humor in the spectacle of Tim Allen as a Shatnerized action figure and Sigourney Weaver as a blond bimbette, but the premise--familiar from the 1986 comedy !3 Amigos!--needs more ingenuity to enliven it than anyone here could muster. In this space epic, no one will hear...
...latest catastrophic crackup involving the $194 million Mars Polar Lander clearly shows--once again--that NASA's remote-control system to land its unmanned spacecraft softly on other planets incorporates unacceptable limitations. The best stage in the exploration of Mars will lie in a manned mission. But this can't happen until there are significant breakthroughs in rocket-fuel flights to attain far higher speeds. All exploration of Mars should be put on hold. The Red Planet can afford to wait. If life ever existed on that icy, parched-dry, dead world, it petered out not less than 3 billion...
...took hundreds of thousands of years to get from hand ax to ax with handle suggests that as of 50,000 B.C., during the Middle Paleolithic, the social brain was not humming very vibrantly. There were only 2 million or 3 million "neurons"--a.k.a., people--scattered across the whole planet, and lacking fiber optics or even postal service, they weren't exactly in constant contact...
...shadows, however, Temujin would create a nation and the most disciplined fighting force on the planet. First, he escaped the wild by making a good marriage. That alliance would lead to more critical alliances as Temujin learned to ply diplomacy and a ruthless militancy. Soon, his almost supernatural generalship would win him fiercely loyal followers, enough to offset a multiplicity of traitors and false friends. He vanquished the fractious tribalism of the Mongols by dispersing clansmen among regiments in an army that used death as discipline and looting as reward. Conquered peoples were divided among the armies, swelling the ranks...