More to Explore
- Sidebar
Crunching the Numbers - Sidebar
Right Stuff - Infographic
The Outer Limits - Sidebar
Threatening Asteroids
More from the Magazine
October
2007 Issue- Skeptic The Really Hard Science
- Sustainable Developments Ending Malaria Deaths in Africa
- Recommended Rapturous Sociability--Armageddon Avoided--The Allure of Venus
- Buy the Digital Edition
Related: 5 Goals for Exploring the Solar System [Interactive]
To a child of the Space Age, books about the solar system from before 1957 are vaguely horrifying. How little people knew. They had no idea of the great volcanoes and canyons of Mars, which make Mount Everest look like a worn hillock and the Grand Canyon like a roadside ditch. They speculated that Venus beneath its clouds was a lush, misty jungle, or maybe a dry, barren desert, or a seltzer water ocean, or a giant tar pit—almost everything, it seems, but what it really is: an epic volcanic wasteland, the scene of a Noah’s flood in molten rock. Pictures of Saturn were just sad: two fuzzy rings where today we see hundreds of thousands of fine ringlets. The giant planet’s moons were gnats, rather than gnarled landscapes of methane lakes and dusty geysers.
Read Comments (1) | Post a comment




