Word: polar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...around this time that, as the economist Michael Kremer has noted, Mother Nature happened to conduct an experiment that underscored the value of large social brains. Melting polar ice caps severed Tasmania from Australia and the New World from the Old World. Thereafter, just as you would expect, the larger the landmass and hence the population, the faster subsistence technology progressed. The people of the vast Old World invented farming before the people of the smaller (and, at first, thinly populated) New World. And the Aborigines of yet smaller Australia never farmed. As for tiny Tasmania, modern explorers, on contacting...
...With Polar Lander nearing its final plunge, NASA promised to respond to the concerns, and the agency did address a couple of them. But by then, the die was largely cast. Maybe the lander was done in by something unforeseeable--a badly placed boulder, perhaps, or a crevasse--which no probe could have avoided. And given the complexities of getting a spacecraft to Mars and having it work properly, it's no surprise that something should...
...advantages to the faster-cheaper-better approach, in fact, is that when probes inevitably do fail, the loss is relatively small. Mars Observer, which vanished without a trace just before Goldin took office, cost the nation more than $1 billion; Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander have set taxpayers back only $319 million between them. "We launched 10 spacecraft in 10 months," said Goldin. "We used to launch two a year. We have to be prepared for failure if we're going to explore...
Even NASA's critics agree that doing things faster, better and cheaper makes sense--if it's done right. Says Pike: "This should provide an opportunity for a midcourse correction." Some sort of correction may already be under way. Goldin has launched a new investigation to look into the Polar Lander loss, and NASA chief of space science Edward Weiler said last week the agency would rethink its ambitious schedule of sending multiple missions to Mars every 26 months through 2007. After years of tipping the other way, "better" may finally be getting the same attention as "faster" and "cheaper...
...then he smirked, a reaction that is actually the polar opposite of the deer-in-the-headlight look that overcame Dan Quayle when he realized he'd exposed his ignorance. No matter how remote Bush's answer to the question at hand, he thinks he's pulled the wool over the teacher's eyes, that with his innate smarts and abundant charm, he will not flunk History 101. After all, it's been arranged. He's going to be President...