Word: sagan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Titan is a kind of time machine," says Sagan, "enabling us to look backward to the time of the early earth. I don't think life there is out of the question...
That possibility was suggested in a recent study of Titan, the largest of Saturn's ten moons, by a team of Cornell University scientists under Astronomer-Exobiologist Carl Sagan. From infra-red and other telescopic measurements of the satellite, a body as large as the planet Mercury, Sagan and his colleagues conclude that Titan is relatively much warmer (about-100° F.) than previously estimated. It also has a thicker atmosphere than had been suspected and is leaking small quantities of hydrogen gas into space. Pondering these surprising conditions on Titan, the Cornell group has evolved a picture...
Time Machine. To account for the higher-than-expected temperatures on a body that is about ten times farther from the sun than the earth is, Sagan explains that Titan's atmosphere must be producing a significant "greenhouse effect"-that is, trapping more heat under its clouds than it radiates back into space. He speculates that those clouds may consist of rust-red organic compounds floating in a thick atmosphere of hydrogen, methane and ammonia coughed up by volcanic eruptions. Exposed to the sun's radiation, the gases could form into complex organic compounds, including sugars, purines...
...what will happen," declared Anthropologist Ashley Montagu. Added Harvard's Nobel-prizewinning biologist-professor George Wald: "However horrifying and destructive, you can't think of anything so horrible that somebody would not feel elated at carrying it out." As a matter of fact, said Cornell Astronomer Carl Sagan, other civilizations may already know about us because of our high-frequency radar and military messages. "That," said Sagan, "may explain why nobody has been here...
...glaciers, sands whipped by winds of hundreds of miles an hour and other tantalizing features that point to previously unsuspected geological, chemical and perhaps biological processes on the red planet. Indeed, the flight of the windmill-shaped spacecraft drastically changed the image of Mars. Says Cornell Astronomer Carl Sagan, one of Mariner's principal scientists: "We have accumulated more information about Mars from the single mission of Mariner than from all previous observations in history...