Word: miles
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...beginning of 2000, only about half the estimated 500 to 1,000 near-Earth asteroids six-tenths of a mile across or larger--big enough to cause a global catastrophe--had been detected. One of the unknowns could even now be on a collision course with Earth. The sudden appearance of long-period comets, usually larger and with better than twice the impact velocity of asteroids, presents an even greater menace. Such objects (comet Hale-Bopp was one) are usually not spotted until they begin to flare somewhere out near the orbit of Jupiter or closer, only...
...those who are intent on joining the 100-mile-high club, Hilton and Budget are plotting to build space hotels, and an Amsterdam outfit is talking about using Russia's old and battered Mir as a decidedly low-rent celestial motel--although if you're thinking of staying on Mir, you may want to check the Michelin ratings before booking yourself a suite...
...want to get contemporary--on a geological scale, of course--it was only 49,000 years ago that an iron asteroid blasted out Arizona's three-quarter-mile-wide Meteor Crater, almost certainly killing any living creatures for hundreds of miles around. As recently as 1908, a small rocky asteroid or chunk of a comet exploded five miles above the Tunguska region of Siberia, felling trees, starting fires and killing wildlife over an area of more than 1,000 sq. mi. Had the blast, now estimated at tens of megatons, occurred over New York City or London, hundreds of thousands...
...what about near misses? As recently as 1996, an asteroid about a third of a mile wide passed within 280,000 miles of Earth--a hairbreadth by astronomical standards. It was the largest object ever observed to pass that close and, had it hit, would have caused an explosion in the 5,000-to-12,000-megaton range. What was particularly unnerving about this flyby is that the asteroid was discovered only four days before it hurtled past Earth. All the more reason for a detection system that will discover asteroids early, plot their paths and predict, many years...
...almost any standard, the best yardstick for measuring how steadily--if slowly--athletic performance has improved is the mile run. In 1900 the record for the mile was a comparatively sleepy 4 min. 12 sec. It wasn't until 1954 that Roger Bannister of Britain cracked the 4-min. mark, coming in six-tenths of a second under the charmed figure. In the half-century since, uncounted thousands of mile heats have been run, yet less than 17 additional seconds have been shaved off Bannister's record--about a third of a second per year...