Word: planet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...guides the ship on a voyage made possible only by the imagination, with the help of a Hollywood special-effects crew. Into the arms of giant galaxies he goes, through halos of stars, past a blinking pulsar, skirting the edge of a black hole, even reconnoitering a distant planet that seems to be inhabited...
...extraordinary journey, surmounting all barriers of space and time. The pilot-guide does not pause to question such miracles. Nor does he stint on bold speculation. Passing one planet, he muses, "Intelligent beings may have evolved and reworked this planetary surface in some massive engineering enterprise." Finally returning to the vicinity of home, he talks of "a single, ordinary, yellow dwarf star surrounded by a system of nine planets, dozens of moons, thousands of asteroids and billions of comets?the family of our sun." He fantasizes about large, tenuous life forms in the stormy atmosphere of Jupiter and about small...
...deeper when Carl also stumbled into science fiction. He was especially taken with the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote of sensuous princesses, six-legged beasts of burden, evil warlords and a Virginia gentleman named John Carter, who miraculously transported himself to the Red Planet simply by gazing at it. The dark-eyed youngster, looking up at the night sky from a Brooklyn lot, tried vainly to follow his hero into space. It was a dream that Sagan has never forgotten. Phobos, the name of one of the moons of Mars, now appears on the license plates...
...sign of his growing interest in exobiology: "Radiation and the Origin of the Gene." A key point was that radiation may have been the trigger for the combination of the first DNA molecules. Eventually some 300 more papers would follow, including a particularly brilliant bit of deduction about the planet Venus. At the time, many scientists still regarded Venus as a kind of sister planet of the earth with a benign climate. But radio emissions from the planet were hinting at puzzlingly high temperatures. Sagan pointed out that a Venusian atmosphere of carbon dioxide and water vapor would trap solar...
When the harmonies fall away. Wild Planet finally displays Cindy Wilson's voice, which usually lurks in the background. Wilson grabs the spotlight on "Gimme Back My Man" and even shows up Debbie Harry in Harry's nonchalant nasal style. Wilson sings so convincingly that even an absurd lyric like...