Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...what being alive now, thanks to science and space probes, means: sitting on a crowded planet that is moving very fast. In such a situation, Mooney's narrative suggests, everything that happens matters to everyone. But who can absorb, much less report, everything? The author sometimes reaches for cosmic consciousness and produces more comedy than insights: "On one of the fishing boats in the cove, a young down-islander discovered he had the wrong-size replacement batteries for his transistor and flung them angrily into the water; they sank forty feet and nearly hit a horseshoe crab." The narrative...
Racing toward Saturn at 54,000 m.p.h.-20 times as fast as a speeding bullet-the 1,800-lb. spacecraft came within a cosmic hair of the planet's stormy cloud tops, clearing them by 63,000 miles. Then it plunged downward behind the huge gaseous sphere and passed through a large gap near the edge of the thin disc of icy debris that forms Saturn's multi-hued rings. Finally, like a pebble in a great celestial slingshot, it was sent hurtling off toward Uranus on a new course created by the powerful pull of Saturn...
Will some future Soviet Politburo be as confident about the potency of its strategic rocket forces as the American worst-case planners are? If so, and if those leaders decided to play what Brown has called "the cosmic roll of the dice" by attempting a pre-emptive strike, they would be mounting far and away the most massive and complicated technical operation in history without benefit of a dry run. Even if everything went according to plan, how could the gamblers in the Kremlin be sure the U.S. would not "launch on warning," meaning fire a retaliatory strike as soon...
...when astronomers talk about objects as strange and remote as quasars, about cosmic enigmas like black holes and the faint radio noises that may be an echo of the creation, an ordinary planet, even the second largest in the sun's family, hardly seems likely to awe or surprise. Yet, remarkably, Saturn still has that power, as the Voyager 1 spacecraft so dramatically showed last November. Swooping within 78,000 miles of the luminous ringed sphere, the little robot sent back a collection of full-color images as dazzling as any ever received from deep space...
...William Stewart flew to Baghdad, while TIME correspondents in Paris, London, Washington and other capitals helped assess world reaction. To learn why and how Isreal struck, the Jerusalem bureau drew on an extensive network of scientific, military and diplomatic sources. Says Bureau Chief David Aikman: "There is something almost cosmic about Isreal's conflict with its neighbors. Where else in the world would the chief of the Air Force quote the Bible in answer to a reporter's question...