Word: planetful
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...readers like me who were impressionable kids during the last great green boom, in the early 1990s, the original environmental guru isn't Al Gore but a certain blue-skinned, green-haired, red-briefs-wearing superhero. That would be Captain Planet, summoned by the combined powers of his Planeteers to battle the enemies of Earth like Looten Plunder and Sly Sludge. (The early '90s were a simpler time.) The animated Captain Planet series aired for a few years before petering to an end in 1996 - just a little before the U.S. failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which is almost...
...1970s campy space opera, the One Big Solution is us--that is, Earth. Somewhere in space, a few thousand humans have escaped near genocide by the Cylons, a race of robots of their own creation and indistinguishable from humans. The survivors are driven by the search for a planet--ours--on which a religious legend says the "13th tribe" of man long ago settled...
...then again, there aren't a lot of things like NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, the robotic ships that landed on the Red Planet five years ago this month with an expected lifespan of 90 days and yet have chugged along ever since - surviving paralyzing cold, blinding dust and long periods without sun, all of which occasionally left them silent and still, but only until conditions improved and they shook off the dust, stirred to life and puttered off to do more work. So far, Spirit and Opportunity have beamed home a quarter of a million images...
...goodly distance - 35 million miles in 2003 - which means that the rovers needed seven months to get where they were going. Spirit landed first, bouncing down in a swaddle of air bags in Mars' Gusev Crater. Opportunity followed three weeks later, landing on the other side of the planet in what is now known as Eagle Crater...
...spots were chosen for a very good reason. Despite the caps of ice in Mars' polar regions and the deposits of ice thought to lie beneath the soil, the planet is a desiccated place. But that doesn't mean Mars wasn't once wet, and its topography - scarred with what appear to be ancient river channels and dry seabed - suggests that the planet once fairly sloshed with water. If you want to find signs of ancient life, the key is to follow that water - or at least the places it used...