NASA managed to re-establish contact in the final days to adjust Skylab’s angle for as smooth a re-entry as possible, and final calculations predicted a trajectory across the Southern Ocean and a sparsely populated tract of Western Australia.

The term crowdsourcing wasn’t coined until the web age, undoubtedly because it enabled the collecting, aggregating and processing power we need to let crowdsourcing take full flight. Today it’s used for everything from judging the most attractive female posterior to gathering the funds to make movies.

In the northernmost climes of the world where the Caucasian race originated it was a matter of evolutionary life and death, and even in the temperate zone cities of Australasia today the temperature can routinely fall into single digits — not much fun even if you can buy iPhone apps.