Word: planet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...planet has become an intricate convergence -- of acid rains and rain forests burning, of ideas and Reeboks and stock markets that ripple through time zones, of satellite signals and worldwide television, of advance-purchase airfares, fax machines, the miniaturization of the universe by computer, of T shirts and mutual destinies...
Travel and travel writing are enjoying a sort of brilliant late afternoon, what photographers call the magic hour before sunset. But the romantic sense of remoteness shrivels. Even the trash announces that the planet is all interconnection, interpenetration, black spillage, a maze of mutual implication, trajectories like the wrapped yarn of a baseball...
Those who actually read Salman Rushdie's notorious best seller The Satanic Verses may have absorbed Rushdie's brilliant perception of what the planet has become: old cultures in sudden high-velocity crisscross, a bewilderment of ethnic explosion and implosion simultaneously. The Ayatullah Khomeini's response to Rushdie is (whatever else it is) an exquisite vindication of Rushdie's point. Khomeini's Iranian revolution was exactly a violent repudiation of the new world that the Shah had sponsored. The struggle throughout the Middle East now is, among other things, a collision between Islam and the temptations and intrusions...
...enormous chunk of space rock hit the planet, the Alvarezes theorized, it would have largely disintegrated, casting a pall of iridium-rich dust and other debris over the world that could have lasted for months. Deprived of sunlight by this all-natural version of "nuclear winter," plants -- and the animals that fed on them -- would have died in droves. And when the dust finally settled, the iridium it contained would have formed just such a layer as the Alvarezes found...
...rock into pieces that would hit the earth anyway. A better plan, proposed by concerned scientists in the early 1980s, would be to use explosives to deflect an asteroid rather than destroy it. Properly positioned, a bomb could nudge a threatening object enough to make it miss the planet. The catch, says Harris, is that there would not be much time to react to an approaching celestial body. "With an asteroid like this one," he says, "you'd probably get a day's warning at best." In short, the most sensible thing to do about earth-grazing asteroids...