[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Washington, D.C., is twelve square miles bordered by reality.

Andrew Johnson

 

There is no such thing as a nonpolitical speech by a politician.

Richard M. Nixon

 

This President is going to lead us out of this recovery.

Dan Quayle

 

Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of
ten people couldn't start a conversation.

Kin Hubbard

 

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the
complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is
not true.

Robert Wilensky

 

If you don't know where you're going, you might wind up someplace else.

Yogi Berra

 

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Terraforming

 

The prime target of both Soviet and American probes in recent years has been
Mars, which is seen as the most suitable planet for intensive exploration.
NASA's plans for a series of Mars missions (of which the Pathfinder and
Global Surveyor missions are just the first) are expected to culminate in a
manned landing sometime early next century. They have even longer-term
plans, which has brought the SF term terraforming to public notice.

 

Though science-fiction fans might argue otherwise, the number of words which
originated in that genre but have since become common currency outside the
field is limited: perhaps the best known are waldo, cyberspace and robot
(though it is a moot point whether Karel Capek's play RUR in which this last
term originated should be classified as SF); most SF terms, such as clone,
nanotechnology, cryonics or telekinesis, have been introduced from outside,
though enthusiastically and rapidly taken up by writers greedy for new
ideas.

 

But one word which is genuinely original to the field is terraforming. The
concept is expansive enough perhaps that the mind of an imaginative writer
was needed to invent it: if human beings cannot exist in the open on an
alien world, then change the world. The term is obviously based on the Latin
terra which, like the modern English earth, could be used equally for the
soil and for the whole planet. Since the 1940s Terra has been a common
synonym in SF for Earth, with Terran for one of its inhabitants. (Another is
Earthman, with Earther as a non-sexist alternative occasionally seen; yet
another is Tellurian, which dates from the 1840s and which derives from
another Latin word for earth, tellus, from which we get the name of the
element tellurium; Tellurian has always been much less common and seems to
have died out.)

 

The inventor of the term terraforming was Jack Williamson, in a series of
stories he wrote in the early 1940s which were collected under the title of
Seetee Ship in 1951 (the word's first appearance seemingly in Collision Ship
in 1942, though this is not verified; Seetee is a phonetic transcription of
CT, standing for contraterrene, another compound of terra that was once
another word for antimatter). Though terraforming was quickly established as
a standard term within the SF linguistic ghetto, only in recent decades has
it begun to appear in mainstream writing - it is indicative that the Oxford
English Dictionary has only included it in its third additions volume
published recently (with a first citation from 1949). Some writers feel it
is ugly and have tried to invent alternatives - one well known favorite is
Roger Zelazny's worldscaping - but terraforming is so well established that
these are unlikely to supersede it. Dozens of books have used terraforming
as part of the plot, and many more have employed it as a sub-plot or part of
the background. The verb to terraform, the agent noun terraformer and the
adjective terraformed are also found, a clear sign of a term in active use.

 

The concept has been discussed seriously among futurologists and long-range
planners since the seventies, though Carl Sagan wrote a paper on the subject
as far back as 1961. There have been substantial studies recently on how
Mars could be terraformed, Mars being recognized as the most suitable Solar
System planet for human colonization now that Venus is known to be so
inhospitable. Such researchers tend to refer to their field as planetary
engineering or sometimes geoengineering, which lack the SF associations or
the implication that the planet is to be changed to resemble Earth; they can
also refer to techniques for changing our own planet's climate, say to
reverse global warming, in effect to terraform Earth. A related word is
ecopoesis (also spelt ecopoiesis), the bringing into being of an ecology
that did not previously exist, which also doesn't assume that the new
ecology resembles Earth's.

 

One result of this speculative research has been a rush of SF stories in the
nineties about the colonization of Mars. Perhaps the best known - certainly
the most substantial and best worked out, based on the NASA research - is
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars)
which not only describe the technological processes which are currently
thought most likely to be required to terraform Mars, but also argue out the
case for and against doing so, with radical worldshapers pitted against the
environmentalists who believe that Mars should be preserved as a pristine
environment.

 

Terraforming is now in much the same class as controlled nuclear fusion, as
an idea which has not yet been brought to practicality, but about which
there is a mass of research material. The scale of the project is such that
fusion is likely to win by a big margin, but experts seem to feel that the
fundamental problems are largely solved. It has yet to be decided whether it
would be mankind's biggest adventure yet, an insupportable waste of scarce
resources, or the unforgivable rape of another world.

 

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Under standards established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, what
is the minimum a gallon of ice cream must weigh?

A: Four and one-half pounds.

 

What snack food commercial was pulled off the air in 1970 because of
complaints from an outraged ethnic group?

A: The Frito Bandito commercial for Frito corn chips.  The complaints came
from Mexican-Americans.

 

What fruit did the Visigoths demand in ransom when they laid siege to Rome
in 408?

A: Peppercorns--3,000 pounds of them. Pepper was a highly valued spice at
the time.

 

What ethnic food did Jeno Paulucci make available in supermarkets nationwide
for the very first time in 1947?

A: Paulucci gave us Chinese food--under the Chun King label. He later
brought us Jeno's pizza.

 

Currants--small seedless grapes --were named for their place of origin. Just
where was that?

A: Corinth, Greece. They were originally known as raysons de Corauntz or
"raisins of Corinth."

 

A pound of ground coffee yields 50 cups. How many cups does a pound of tea
yield?

A: 200.

 

Under U.S. government regulations, what percentage of peanut butter has to
be peanuts?

A: 90 percent.