Word: planet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...science today is offering an elaborately conditioned answer about where extraterrestrial life might possibly be. Two American astronomers have found a planet or two outside our solar system whereon conditions exist (liquid water the temperature of hot tea, for example) that may be hospitable to life...
...fascination with extraterrestrials may reflect an exhaustion of the secrets and novelties of Earth and of earthly behavior, which, on the whole, we have come to think, is nothing to write home about. We know one another too well. Perhaps a master system of intergalactic ethics dictates that no planet may have contact with another until it has subdued its own self-destructive violence. Maybe the Earth is under a sort of quarantine...
Because there are so many venerable forms of relationship with mystery, our collaborative citizenship on this planet is moving asymptotically toward a state of being remarkably resembling an interfaith marriage...
PASADENA: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has announced plans to send an unmanned "rover" to Mars at the end of the year, the first sign of NASA's interest in the Red Planet since it lost contact with its billion-dollar Observer spaceship in 1993. NASA plans to launch its Pathfinder mission next December 2, 1996. If it lands on Mars as planned on July 4, 1997, it would be the first time since two Viking missions landed there in 1976. "Mars has always had this romantic hold on us," says TIME aerospace correspondent Jerry Hannifin...
That won't be easy. The newly discovered planets are much bigger than Earth, yet it is almost impossible to learn very much about them. The stars they orbit--70 Virginis in the constellation Virgo and 47 Ursae Majoris in the Great Bear--are each about 35 light-years away. The speediest space probe would take millions of years to reach them; even a radio signal, the fastest known thing in the universe, would need 35 years to get there, and it would take another 35 for any aliens, should they exist, to answer. The planets are so dim that...