Word: planet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...other hand, says Menzel, seeing flying saucers is not the same thing as believing that they are space ships manned by intelligent beings from another planet. This science-fiction approach is like "explaining" lightning by calling it a weapon of Zeus: it merely supplants one mystery by another mystery. Calling the saucers space ships explains them, after a fashion, but it summons up the greater mystery of a godlike super-race living on Mars or Venus. "How simple is this sort of science," says Menzel, "and how wrong...
...without being melted by the heat of friction. No style of aircraft known to man could move so fast in complete silence. No human crew could make the sudden stops and turns without being killed by "G-forces." Therefore, argue the space-shippers, the saucers must come from another planet where aeronautical technology is more advanced than on earth...
...awful the Earth's historical development has been, how ridiculously evangelistic we Earthlings really are, and what is in store for us in a few millenia if we do not get rid of all these thinking machines that have been developed. It seems that the inhabitants of a planet, Rerma by name, will be destroyed if they do not bring all the inhabitants of the Galaxy up to their cultural and economic and social standards. To save themselves, they must find some race willing to reshape the Universe, for they themselves are too specialized and well adjusted...
...historical critique comes when the captain of the Process Corps is raising the people of some idyllic Polynesian-like planet to the level of Europe during the era of Kings and princes. It is all very excruciating--happy people made unhappy, loved ones killed and so forth--and not even for a good purpose, unless you consider the directives of a think maching and the protection of a planet of well adjusted specialists a good purpose...
...space, says Harvard's Astronomer Donald H. Menzel, the sun revolves like a tremendous lawn sprinkler. From its seething corona dense clouds of hydrogen squirt out at speeds up to 600 miles a second. Every so often one of those clouds hits the earth and bathes the planet in a shower of solar gas. But earthlings are protected by bumpers of magnetic force-invisible bars that stretch from pole to pole...