Word: planetful
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...Clarke novel superior aliens arriving in the form of a black monolith, the Devil, or a spaceship as big as a planet, would resolve the stalemate, usually by initiating man into a higher consciousness. Overmind--mind without matter--is the highest product of evolution in Clarke's scheme. Such a mind can flit from star to star, experience eternity as a single instant, and generally paint the universe red. (so if you were wondering what that baby floating across the stars at the end of 2001 was all about, now you know...
...possessed a nuclear stockpile of 8000 megatons (million tons of dynamite equivalent), according to Ruth Sivard, the former chief economist of the Arms Control Disarmament Agency. That is equal to 615,385 Hiroshima bombs. When one considers that the rest of the planet possesses another 8000 megatons, one realizes that human history has clearly moved into the age of overkill...
...policy. In an era of "the closing circle," of limited resources and increasing competition for those resources, resources used for weapons are unavailable for human needs. It is a question of priorities. One United Nations statistic should suffice: between July 1974 and June 1975, ten million people on this planet starved to death. At the same time, the world governments collectively spent more than $300 billion on armaments. The U.S. and the Soviet Union alone accounted for 70 percent of all arms spending...
Like tourists everywhere, the two Viking landers and their orbiters have spent much of the 15 months since their arrival on Mars snapping pictures of the Red Planet. The latest batch includes the best and most revealing shots yet. Among the pictures released by NASA: a photomosaic of the planet's north pole, showing a concentric pattern of striations in the ice cap; a color snapshot showing newly formed frost on the ground near the feet of the dust-covered Viking 2 lander; and a photo proving that something-wind, a tremor, a frost heave-has caused a portion...
...potential broader social or ethical implications of initiating this line of research--of its role, as a possible prelude to longer-range, broader-scale genetic engineering of the fauna and flora of the planet including ultimately, man...Shall we take into our hands our own future evolution...