The discovery of three more faint objects in similar orbits over the next six years Pallas, Juno, and Vesta complicated that elegant solution to the missing-planet problem and gave rise to the surprisingly long-lived though no longer accepted idea that the asteroids were remnants of a planet that had exploded.
Cooperation of species may well be the missing story to resolving much of our planets problems, and art might be the most powerful way to convey this idea.
In Anne Tyler's A Patchwork Planet, the problem is a missing turkey (and one too many pumpkin pies).
In the late 19th century scientists diagnosed a shortage of nitrogen as a planet-wide problem.
But they look like an arts-and-crafts approach to a planet-sized problem.
"Most of the environmental stuff out there now is toys compared to the scale we need to really solve the planet's problems," Mr. Khosla said.
This is exactly like the start of the film 2012, except all the planet's problems have been localised to one guy's bed, and also John Cusack's voice is much higher than you'd expect it to be.
Whereas the young people, who are always ticking me off for reactionary and outdated thinking, tend to think globally about the planet's problems, they also tend to leave all the lights on locally – and throw food into the bin locally too.
In my book, there is a section called "Planet Scale Problems".
A fully spherical simulation seemed appropriate, however, the divergence of the resolution in angle, as one moved away from the planet, caused problems in accurately tracking electromagnetic waves.
Ultimately, Big Data is not a "magical potion" that will solve the planet's problems.
