Word: morowitz
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...introduction, SelectaVision was fatally upstaged by an electronic relative, the videocassette recorder, which had come out six years earlier. Most consumers prefer VCRs because the machines can record broadcasts as well as play prerecorded tapes. SelectaVision machines, by contrast, allow the user to play only prerecorded discs. Says Arthur Morowitz, president of New York's Video Shack chain: "It was a dinosaur from the beginning. There was never a really strong need...
Just the same, say Astronomer and Exobiologist* Carl Sagan and Biophysicist Harold Morowitz, it is conceivable that earth's nearest planetary neighbor could be home to living organisms. In balloonlike form, Venusian life could float in the dense atmosphere, never approaching the searing surface...
Because the organisms would encounter severe cold if they drifted farther up in the clouds, or extreme heat if they descended too far toward the surface, Morowitz and Sagan speculate that they must be regulated to hover at an essentially fixed altitude. Thus, the organisms could well take the form of a gasbag or float bladder containing hydrogen gas-which the organism itself could produce by decomposing water...
...critics who point out that it would be difficult for life to arise spontaneously in the atmosphere, Morowitz and Sagan have a ready answer: it did not. Instead, they postulate, ancient Venus had a much thinner atmosphere; its surface, now superheated by the greenhouse effect of a thick carbon-dioxide-filled atmosphere, was once cool enough to spawn life. As more gas was spewed into the atmosphere by volcanic action, however, the surface temperatures gradually became unbearable and could have driven the more buoyant organisms into the clouds, where they evolved and may well exist today...
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