Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Steven Spielberg and Michael Phillips (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) for a project that they are still keeping secret. Eventually the shuttle may be used for far bolder enterprises: assembling solar power satellites that can collect the sun's rays and beam that concentrated energy down to earth; erecting giant antennas that could revolutionize global communications; and putting together still other spaceships that can carry cargo and people to higher orbits, to the moon or beyond...
...moon is only the offshore island of earth. We now know, thanks to our robot explorers, that the other children of the sun are more fantastic places than we had ever dreamed. The Voyager reconnaissance of Jupiter's giant moons has revealed what is virtually a whole new solar system of baffling complexity...
Today's comsats demonstrate how an object can remain poised over a fixed spot on the equator by matching its speed to the turning earth, 22,320 miles below. Now imagine a cable, linking the satellite to the ground. Payloads could be hoisted up it by purely mechanical means, reaching orbit without any use of rocket power. The cost of operations could be reduced to a tiny fraction of today's values...
...devout Muslim's obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca. On his way back from Islam's holiest city, he got into a squabble with a group of Sunni Muslims in a Damascus mosque. In keeping with his own Shi'a tradition, Khomeini had placed a handful of earth on his prayer rug, and was preparing to put his forehead upon it. The Sunnis angrily objected to this practice, Khomeini deftly answered that it was wrong to place one's forehead directly on a rug, that one should be more humble than that...
...outsiders: spiritualists, religious psychics, occultists and assorted "New Age" sects. Melton is convinced that America is as spiritual as it ever was, but that more people are becoming attached to the obscure faiths. Says Melton: "We are probably the most religious people-and the most diversely religious people-on earth...