Word: planetful
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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...
...HARD TO IMAGINE TWO more undesirable pieces of extraterrestrial real estate. The first, a planet orbiting a star known as 47 Ursae Majoris, 200 trillion miles from Earth in the Big Dipper, is about twice the size of Jupiter. Like our own largest planet, it probably consists mostly of such noxious gases as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and methane. Fierce jet streams blow unceasingly at hundreds of miles per hour, sometimes spiraling into mammoth hurricanes that last for centuries and are big enough to swallow the Earth. And if this harsh world has any solid surface at all, it's buried...
...realm of tangible fact. Despite years of searching with the most powerful telescopes, despite decades of listening for the faint crackle of radio signals from distant civilizations, despite endless theorizing about how life might or might not arise, nobody had ever found concrete evidence to suggest that our planet, our civilization, our life-forms were anything but unique in the cosmos...
...fascination with other worlds is as old as Western civilization. Galileo's discovery that they actually existed--that at least some of the pinpoints of light that wandered throughout the night sky had mountains and moons--set off a centuries-long quest to discover new planets. The first great success came in 1781, when William Herschel found Uranus. Then came the discovery of Neptune by Johann Galle in 1846. Eventually, the notion of otherworldly life made the transition out of the pages of philosophy and fiction: in 1894, the wealthy astronomer Percival Lowell built his own observatory in Arizona...