Word: interstellar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Robert J. Davis '51, associate of the Harvard College Observatory and director and designer of the orbiting telescope called Project Celescope, said he has reached two important conclusions from the data analyzed so far. He discovered that "Diffuse nebulae-large interstellar hydrogen gas clouds in which stars are formed-are brighter than we can easily explain...
...space traveler should fail to wonder at this phenomenon on what he supposes to be an alien planet. But Heston expresses no amazement at his ability to communicate with his captors, and while screenwriters Rod Serling and Michael Wilson can rely on the existence of other movies in which interstellar strangers speak the same tongue, the flaw is no less glaring for its ability to elude the audience...
There were other, more remarkable changes in the sky. At the tremendous velocities necessary for interstellar travel, there were noticeable Doppler shifts in the frequencies of light emitted from the stars. As the spacecraft approached stars at high velocity, their light appeared to be shifted toward the blue, or higher frequency end of the spectrum. Moving rapidly away from other stars caused their light to appear more red. Stars viewed through the front window of the spacecraft generally became more blue, those through the rear window more red, as the spacecraft velocity increased...
...saucer advocates who suggest that extraterrestrial beings accidentally discovered the earth's civilization during random exploration of the universe, Sagan has an answer: "If each of a million advanced technical civilizations in our galaxy launched at random an interstellar spacecraft each year, our solar system would, on the average, be visited only once every 100,000 years...
...prehistoric man, everything he saw probably seemed alive; death was the unthinkable anomaly. The situation is reversed in a scientifically oriented world; amid dead matter, life seems an unaccountable, brief flash in the interstellar dark. Not that this has destroyed the power of faith to confront death. Beyond the doubts of its own "demythologers," and on a plane of thought beyond either denial or confirmation by science, Christianity still offers the hope of eternal life. Theologians are debating whether this means immortality in the sense of the survival of the soul, or resurrection, in the sense of a new creation...