Word: planet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...done by gyroscopic devices that act in response to radio signals from the earth. With its sail broadside to the light, it will be pushed farther and farther from the sun in wider and wider orbits. Eventually it will reach the orbits of Mars or the outer planets and can take a look at them. A fragile space sailer could not land on any planet; even a brush with the fringe of an atmosphere would destroy the sail. But it could be maneuvered to approach smaller bodies in space that have no atmosphere...
Brave New World Revisited, by Aldous Huxley. One of the 20th century's brightest gloomologers decides that fact has already caught up with his 1932 horror fiction, what with subliminal commercials, wholesale tranquilization, and the threat of much too well-bred man crowding himself off his own planet...
...Calvin points out, has reached a critical stage. The highest product of its evolutionary chain-man-is on the point of learning how to navigate space and spread beyond the earth. "There is no reason to suppose that life, and man as its representative, will not transform any planet on which he lands, in the same way, or even in a more profound way than he has transformed the surface of the earth. It might suit him to change the orbit of the moon, and it seems within the realm of possibility that he should be able...
...only 27 years later, there are 2,800,000,000 of us." People keep breeding, as it were, behind Huxley's back. Clean water, penicillin, DDT are also to blame, he says. Soon there will not be enough to eat, Huxley warns, and suggests that occupancy of this planet by more than 3 billion persons is dangerous and should be unlawful...
...ever there was a people ripe for a dictatorship, it is the American people today," playwright-novelist Gore Vidal, author of Visit to a Small Planet, said yesterday afternoon...