Time Magazine PLANET OF THE YEAR, Page 72 Magnitudes Earth's wrath at our assaults is slow to come But relentless when it does. It has to do With catastrophic change, and with the limit At which one order more of magnitude Will bring us to a qualitative change And disasters drastically different From those we daily have to know about. As with the speed of light, where speed itself Becomes a limit and an absolute; As with the splitting of the atom And a little later of the nucleus; As with the millions rising into billions -- The piker's kind in terms of money, yes, But a million square in terms of time and space As the universe grew vast while the earth Our habitat diminished to the size Of a billiard ball, both relative To the cosmos and to the numbers of ourselves, The doubling numbers, the earth could accommodate. We stand now in the place and limit of time Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream, And nightmares still confined in sleeping dark Seem on the point of bringing into day The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up. One or another nightmare may come true, And what to do then? What in the world to do?