Spaceship Earth: Entropy Factor #1

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson

Global Energy Consumption

Comets are thought to be some of the oldest, most primitive bodies in the solar system, but new research on the comet Wild 2 indicates that inner solar system material was transported to the comet-forming region at least 1.7 million years after the formation of the oldest solar system solids.

Published in Science, the research provides the first constraint on the age of cometary material from a known comet. The findings are published in the Feb. 25 edition of Science Express.

The NASA Stardust mission to comet Wild 2, which launched in 1999, was designed around the premise that comets preserve pristine remnants of materials that helped form the solar system. In 2006, Stardust returned with the first samples from a comet.