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<text id=89TT0026>
<title>
Jan. 02, 1989: Magnitudes
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
Jan. 02, 1989 Planet Of The Year:Endangered Earth
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
PLANET OF THE YEAR, Page 72
Magnitudes
</hdr><body>
<qt> <l>Earth's wrath at our assaults is slow to come</l>
<l>But relentless when it does. It has to do</l>
<l>With catastrophic change, and with the limit</l>
<l>At which one order more of magnitude</l>
<l>Will bring us to a qualitative change</l>
<l>And disasters drastically different</l>
<l>From those we daily have to know about.</l>
<l>As with the speed of light, where speed itself</l>
<l>Becomes a limit and an absolute;</l>
<l>As with the splitting of the atom</l>
<l>And a little later of the nucleus;</l>
<l>As with the millions rising into billions --</l>
<l>The piker's kind in terms of money, yes,</l>
</qt>
<qt> <l>But a million square in terms of time and space</l>
<l>As the universe grew vast while the earth</l>
<l>Our habitat diminished to the size</l>
<l>Of a billiard ball, both relative</l>
<l>To the cosmos and to the numbers of ourselves,</l>
<l>The doubling numbers, the earth could accommodate.</l>
<l>We stand now in the place and limit of time</l>
<l>Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream,</l>
<l>And nightmares still confined in sleeping dark</l>
<l>Seem on the point of bringing into day</l>
<l>The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up.</l>
<l>One or another nightmare may come true,</l>
<l>And what to do then? What in the world to do?</l>
</qt>
</body></article>
</text>