Word: simplest
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...simplest kind of instrumented space probe can gather much valuable information without landing on the moon or a planet. A picture of the back of the moon is one of the easiest prizes. Interplanetary space is by no means empty. It contains a very thin gas of unknown composition, and through it a "wind" of high-speed particles blows outward from the sun. This wind may be dangerous; it should be studied carefully before manned ships are launched deeply into space...
Challenge & Response. Simplest and most basic motivation of the drive into space is man's enduring and insatiable drive to explore and know his environment. Space is a challenge simply because, like Mount Everest, it is there. Hundreds of millions of years ago, earth's life ventured from the shelter of the oceans, crept slowly and painfully out on land, into the hostile air and searing sun. Man is venturing forth again into a new element. From the bottom of the air ocean where he has lived so long, the emptiness overhead looks almost impossibly hostile. Its vacuum...
...Kierkegaard (1813-55), to raise the flag of philosophic revolt against all purely rationalist and positivist systems, and to declare that reality and truth are within man himself and his actions, whether they be rational or no. Kierkegaard argued that the central, all-important fact about man is the simplest one: his existence. But because man is the only creature who is self-conscious (in the literal sense, "conscious of himself"), he is the only one who can be consciously aware of his existence. From this flows the corollary: he thus becomes aware of the possibility of nonexistence. And from...
...simplest maneuver for a sailing spaceship, says Dr. Cotter, will be escape from the earth. The satellite will be placed in an orbit in the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun (see diagram). After spreading its sail, the satellite will be designed to have a slow turning motion, rotating once during every two trips around the earth. When it is moving away from the sun, its sail will be at right angles to the sun's light, and it will get the maximum push in a forward direction. By the time it gets...
Some time, some place in the dark backward and abysm of time, the first "living" thing was created, and evolution began. But even the simplest organism is made up of enormously complicated chemical compounds. How were these compounds produced in the slow aeons of the world's beginnings? Last week Dr. Melvin Calvin, professor of chemistry at the University of California, described some probable steps in the strange, speculative science of chemical evolution that led to the first glimmer of life...