Word: planetful
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Late last year Woody Allen made history. The epochal event was not his affair with Soon-Yi Farrow Previn, an adopted daughter of Allen's companion Mia Farrow. That sort of escapade is common enough in the long, tawdry life of this planet. But on Dec. 17, 1991, in the Surrogate Court of the State of New York in Manhattan, Allen became a separate but equal adoptive parent of Moses and Dylan Farrow, whom Mia had previously adopted. Each adult was given parental rights. Never before in New York, and perhaps in the U.S., had an unmarried couple been allowed...
...some hope is forming on the margins. Much of the continent has turned into a battleground of contending dooms: AIDS and overpopulation, poverty, starvation, illiteracy, corruption, social breakdown, vanishing resources, overcrowded cities, drought, war and the homelessness of war's refugees. Africa has become the basket case of the planet, the "Third World of the Third World," a vast continent in free fall...
...comet or an asteroid strike about 65 million years ago is the favored explanation for why dinosaurs vanished from the earth so abruptly after having dominated the planet for the preceding 70 million years. The tremendous plume of smoke and dust thrown into the atmosphere by the space intruder's impact, equivalent to perhaps a million hydrogen bombs, would have blocked out sunlight for months. The globe would have gone into a dark, deep freeze, killing first the plants and then the giant lizards that fed on them, directly or indirectly -- paving the way for mammals, and eventually humans...
...Whatever. No grandchild of mine has ever asked my advice about taking a trip to another planet. How can I possibly respond...
About 1,300 km (800 miles) long, the San Andreas Fault system separates two sections of the earth's crust known as plates. Like giant rafts, these plates glide across an expanse of superheated rock, viscous as tar, that surrounds the planet's molten outer core. At the rate of nearly 5 cm (2 in.) a year, the Pacific plate to the west of the San Andreas is slowly pushing north, past the North American plate on the east. One possible result: 60 million or so years from now, a sliver of the California coast that includes the megalopolis...