Word: planet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whenever the stargazers of ancient Babylon focused their attention on Mars, they regarded its reddish orange glow as an omen of bloodshed and disaster. Looking more objectively at the red planet through powerful telescopes, modern astronomers have attributed its odd color to deposits of iron-rich minerals like limonite. Now two former University of Massachusetts researchers have proposed a new explanation of the puzzling Martian hue. During a recent meeting at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, Physicists William T. Plummer and Robert K. Carson reported that parts of Mars may be covered by a strange kind...
Plummer and Carson came upon their theory while studying an entirely different planet-Venus. To determine the possible composition of the yellowish white atmosphere of Venus they decided to experiment with a little-known, foul-smelling liquid called carbon suboxide (C3O2). As the physicists increased its temperature, the compound solidified and underwent a series of color changes from pale yellow to orange, reddish brown, purple and a shade approaching black. Although the yellow vaguely resembled the tint of Venusian clouds, the range of colors was far more suggestive of the surface of Mars, which undergoes still unexplained variations in shading...
...slipped them on, and it was like Superman in the stockroom at the Daily Planet, a large metropolitan newspaper. I walked around the place with this really cocky stride and checked them out in the mirror. I was too much. I wondered how I put up with those ??? ??? booties for so long...
...main character of the first book is the planet Arrakis, a mystifying desert waste which has never been fully mapped or understood by those who call themselves its rulers. The planet's true owners, the Fremen, are a tribe who exist in total secrecy on the face of the desert. Their terrible purpose-to change the planet's ecology totally and transform it into a fertile land-is the force which transforms Paul Atreides into Muad'dib, a semidivine military leader who eventually topples the Emperor and becomes master of the Galaxy. Melange-an addictive spice grown only on Arrakis...
Everybody should read Dune. Everybody should read Dune Messiah. We owe Herbert a lot-he may be the only man writing, in sci-fi or out of it, who can think like a planet. And St. Gildas knows we need to think that way. Life right now is a plausible fantasy-and not a very pleasant one. Read Dune Messiah and touch something real...