Word: martianize
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Lopsided Planet. Eros is one of hundreds of asteroids (small planets) spinning around the sun as devotedly as if they were big planets. Mostly their orbits lie between Mars and Jupiter. The egg-shaped orbit of Eros, however, swings it far inside the Martian track and it is possible for it to approach within 14,000.000 miles of Earth. After its discovery in 1898. asteroid watchers noticed that sometimes Eros varied in brightness over a period of 5¼ hr. If this was the period of its rotation, the variation might have been due to one side being much darker...
...spectroscopic analysis of this "earthshine" and by inferring additional details from the known phenomena of optics, astronomers can form a plausible idea of how Earth looks from other planets. Last week Director Vesto Melvin Slipher of Lowell Observatory (Flagstaff, Ariz.) told how Earth must look to Mars. The Martian astronomer sees a planet bluer than Venus and bigger. If he looks sharp he can see the polar caps shrinking and spreading with the change of seasons. Through rifts in the cloud veil, he discerns great blue-black patches which by spectroscopic analysis he finds, with croaks of envy...
...might as well have come from Mars as from his native Samoa. Like any Martian visitor he landed in San Francisco, intelligent, stiltedly educated, highly moral. But he had little money and he did not know the customs of the country. He was having a fine time, however, and thought everyone was as nice as could be, until one fine day a strapping girl persuaded him to go swimming with nothing on. A policeman ran him in, the girl's brother got a gang together and beat him up. Disillusion dawning, Uan went away from there...
...personalized, it brings the thing home and emphasizes the nearness of international slaughter to all of us, makes us feel that was is an imminent possibility for everybody and makes us strongly determined to avoid it in any way. At a time when the air is full of Martian rumblings it is particularly valuable...
Some philosophers would follow Martian and his "anti-Moderne" or Paul Doolin in his admiration of the Middle Ages and Thomas Aquinas; or they would follow other paths. But none but one of the perennial, age-old doom predictors would try to continue talking of the impending and, we are told, inevitable, Death o Civilization...