Current Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver
, Current Deputy NASA Administrator Lori Garver, et. al., 1994
Excerpts Our understanding of the history of Earth and its inhabitants is undergoing a radical change. The gradual processes of geologic change and evolution, it is now clear, are
punctuated by natural catastrophes on a colossal scale - catastrophes resulting from collisions of large asteroids and comets with Earth. It is, to use the popular term, a "paradigm shift." This "new catastrophism," is not unlike the revolutions brought about by the heliocentric solar system of Copernicus, or Darwinian evolution, or the big bang. In retrospect, such revolutionary ideas always seem obvious. On reading the
Origin of Species, Thomas Huxley remarked simply: "Why didn't I think of that." Now, looking at the Moon, we find ourselves wondering why it took so long to ask whether the process that cratered its surface is still going on. [...]
The long time scale between major impacts has implications for public policy. Governments do not function on geologic time. On the North Dakota prairie near the town of Grand Forks, lie the abandoned ruins of America's ballistic missile defense system. ... Built in accordance with the ABM treaty, the Grand Forks facility was meant to defend our retaliatory capacity. It was declared operational in 1975 - and decommissioned the same year. National leaders had been persuaded by some scientists that the Grand Forks facility would meet the threat to our intercontinental ballistic missile fleet, even though other scientists warned that the system was dangerous and ineffective. It was closed because the money to operate it was needed for other projects that were deemed to be more urgent.
Comment: Hmm...perhaps this sheds some light on this poor rooster's plight: "Scientists are warning that manmade pollutants which have escaped into the environment mimic the female sex hormone oestrogen" from Men under threat from 'gender bending' chemicals.