Search Results

This chapter provides a historicized survey of the eclectic roots of evangelical prophecy fiction. While fictional narratives have become the public face of evangelical faith, this chapter demonstrates their late success. Throughout their history, evangelicals have traditionally suspected the morality of fictional narratives, and that suspicion was perhaps most obvious in fundamentalist and premillennial cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in the very cultures from which Left Behind has emerged. This chapter surveys the sometimes surprising theological variety of early evangelical prophecy fiction, and charts its slow movement toward prophetic and other orthodoxies. The chapter develops on the basis of a close reading of two important early prophecy novels – Joseph Birkbeck Burroughs’s Titan (1905), and Milton Stine’s The Devil’s Bride (1910).

This chapter looks at climate change in the broader planetary sense. It examines evolutionary process in planetary atmospheres, with an application to the modelling of the evolution of the Earth's climate from the Precambrian to the present time. It examines the comparative climatology of the terrestrial planets and looks at the atmospheres of the giant planets. The photochemical and climate modelling techniques developed in the earlier chapters is then applied to Titan's haze formation and atmosphere. A brief look is given to extrasolar planets.

This chapter examines the hydrologic cycle on Saturn's moon Titan, which has an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. Titan is an evolving atmosphere, close to the lower size limit of objects that can retain a sizeable atmosphere over geologic time. Below this limit, the atmospheres are tenuous and transient. The chapter first provides an overview of Titan's atmospheric evolution before discussing its hydrologic cycle and lakes. It then considers Titan's energetic weather in a low-energy environment, focusing on temperature and winds, and the difficulty of retaining an atmosphere on Titan due to its small gravity and proximity to the Sun. It also explains the anti-greenhouse effect and production of higher hydrocarbons on Titan.

This chapter deals with the reception of Ancient Rome in the works of German Romanticism, in the broad sense, analogous to what is often called the Kunstperiode (Heine) or simply the Goethezeit (Korff). Many of these works are involved in a struggle with time, balancing nostalgia and utopianism, while at the same time manifesting what could be referred to as a quest for contemporaneity. At the centre of this quest are the novels by the German author Jean Paul, most prominently his so-called ‘heroic novel’ Titan, published between 1800 and 1804. In this novel, the hero, count Albano, travels to Rome, but instead of following in the footsteps of his predecessors Goethe and Herder, who immersed themselves in nostalgic feelings of past greatness, the experience of Ancient Rome is translated into a decision to go to France and join the revolutionary army.

This chapter discusses the development of the Titan family of space-launch vehicles. While NASA was just getting started with the massive development effort for the Saturn launch vehicles, the Air Force began work on what became the Titan family of launch vehicles, beginning with the Titan IIIs and ending with Titan IVBs. Essentially, most of these vehicles consisted of upgraded Titan II cores with a series of upper stages. Most of the vehicles also used a pair of huge, segmented strap-on solid-propellant motors to supplement the thrust of the Titan II core vehicle. And after September 1988 a limited number of actual Titan IIs, refurbished and equipped with technology and hardware from the Titan III program, joined the other members of the Titan family of launch vehicles. Beginning in June 1989, Titan IV with a stretched core and with seven (instead of Titan III's five or five and a half) segments in its solid rocket motors became the newest member of the Titan family.

One of the biggest open questions is whether life is unique to Earth or whether it exists elsewhere. Science fiction authors have speculated about lifeforms that are very different to the life that we are familiar with. These speculations include silicon-based lifeforms on Star Trek, Fred Hoyle’s sentient Black Cloud and even nuclear lifeforms on neutron stars in the novel Dragon’s Egg. Several bodies in the Solar System have been proposed as possible homes to life. These include Mars and the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, several of which are believed to have subsurface oceans. The most intriguing possibilities are Europa, Enceladus and Titan.

This chapter examines the moral performance of prisons. It focuses specifically on the proposed creation of Titan prisons, which are argued to be unhealthy and damaging institutions. Within a comparative paradigm, the chapter insists that smaller establishments are, compared to Titans, more humane and personal. In the chapter, four relevant issues are considered. First, the chapter reviews some of the dilemmas faced by contemporary prisons and the extent to which the case exists for new-build establishments. Second, the question of prison size and its implications on prison life are considered. Third, some of the missing problems that were not acknowledged in the Carter Report are considered. And finally, the chapter provides a summary of some of the thoughts on the Carter Report and its approach to the problems of the Prison Service.

This chapter discusses the result of the seminar at King's College. This seminar tackled Lord Carter' dominant views in his Securing the future: i) the establishment of a permanent sentencing commission to provide a more structured sentencing framework; and ii) the creation of Titans, multi-functional prisons that can provide additional 2,500 prison places. In the seminar, the participants were divided into three groups: the Sentencing Guidelines Council, the Sentencing Advisory Panel, and the policy outsiders. While the knowledge of the policy developments on sentencing and prison population varied, two dominant opinions began to emerge: first, that the idea of a sentencing commission should receive serious consideration; and second, that the construction of Titan prisons should be removed. In addition to these dominant opinions, the seminar also pinpointed that the prison-population crisis was a predictable and predicted dilemma wherein the government had failed to heed the warnings or plan accordingly.

This chapter argues that the reason why our natural environment has taken such a hit over the generations is it has been thought of and dealt with in pieces, chopped up into segments that can easily be labeled and disposed of—like the Titan Cement permits. Even on the university campus where the author has worked for more than twenty years, natural spaces are typically considered either as mere scenery or future building sites—not as parts of a single connected ecosystem of intrinsic value beyond pleasure or use. David Quammen begins his brilliant book Song of the Dodo by asking his reader to imagine a beautiful Persian carpet, say, twelve by eighteen feet square. Now take a sharp knife, he says: “We set about cutting the carpet into thirty-six equal pieces, each one a rectangle two feet by three.” We wind up with the same 216 square feet of carpet-like stuff. “But what does it amount to?” he asks. “Have we got thirty-six nice Persian throw rugs? No. All we're left with is three dozen ragged fragments, each one worthless and commencing to come apart.”

This chapter describes how Clarke’s science fiction consistently advocates, and vividly depicts, humanity’s future achievements in space. Without providing a consistent “Future History,” his stories collectively argue that humans will gradually colonize space stations, the moon, Mars, and other planets and moons, though humans may never advance beyond the solar system. Clarke unusually acknowledges the need for computers in space, and instead of featuring pioneering expeditions, he usually focuses on the everyday lives of space colonists, emphasizing both the perils of space life and its potential benefits, such as greater longevity. Living aliens are rarely encountered, though evidence of ancient aliens may be detected. Clarke’s major novel about human space travel, Imperial Earth (1975), explores life on Titan by chronicling a resident’s visit to Earth.

Organisms that live with ice are extremophiles, and are viewed as analogues for potential life on other planets and their moons in our solar system. Extraterrestrial cryospheric environments are found on Mars, Europa (a Jovian moon), and Enceladus and Titan (small and large Saturnian moons, respectively). This chapter describes their potential for supporting both water and life, along with the types of chemical reactions that might be exploited as energy sources, which include methanogenesis on Mars, Enceladus, and Titan; and oxidation of organic matter on Europa. Finally, the weaknesses of using terrestrial environments as analogues for those in the extraterrestrial cryosphere are discussed.

This chapter discusses the exploration of areas beyond Mars, or the outer system. The inner and outer systems are separated by a void between Mars and Jupiter populated by thousands of remnants of the ancient Solar System, the main asteroid belt. The outer system is six times larger than the inner system. Mars, comparable to Antarctica, is balmy compared with the objects here. While the lowest recorded temperature on the Antarctic plateau is −89.5°C(−128.5°F), or 183.5 K, in Ceres it is 167 K, Jupiter's moon Callisto is 120 K, and Saturn's moon Titan is 90 K. Uranus's Shakespearian twins, Oberon and Titania, are ~60 K. Neptune's Triton, the coldest moon of all, is 35 K.

This chapter examines science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s novels The Game Players of Titan, Clans of the Alphane Moon, and Now Wait for Last Year. In The Game Players of Titan, The Game, which was imported from Titan to Terra as the free gift that came with conquest, is nevertheless recognizable as Monopoly, although the stakes turn out to be as high in fact as one always imagined them to be anyway. To be B is to own property: because to begin the game is the deed. In Clans of the Alphane Moon, Dick plots psychosis along social or interpersonal lines. The story begins with the couple in crisis and ends up joining the clan society of psychotics. In Now Wait for Last Year, Kathy swallows a new drug that, unknown to her, was created highly toxic and immediately addictive as secret weapon for use in interstellar warfare. To motivate him to find the cure, Kathy slips her husband Eric the drug while visiting him at his new home base. The drug conveys “a sense of having imbibed of death itself”.

The author takes us to visit Saturn’s moon Titan, and Venus, Mars, and to the unconfirmed planet GJ581d. Although we find unearthly conditions on these bodies’ surfaces today, things were different in the past. Even now, there are oceans deep below Titan’s frozen ice shell that itself sees liquid methane rains and vast ethane-filled lakes. Venus and Mars both had liquid water long ago, while Venus may even have been comfortably warm and humid before modern complex life developed on Earth. Many potentially habitable exoplanets are likely locked in their rotation to always face their star with the same side, causing incredible differences between their day and night sides. This chapter reviews how oceans and atmospheres are lost by the Sun’s magnetism or protected by that of the planets’, how masses of carbon dioxide can be stored in solid limestone, and how habitable zones shift to and from planets.

A collaboration with the Goddard Space Flight Centre and Paris Observatory took the Oxford group to the ringed planet Saturn on the NASA Cassini mission. The main interest was Titan, Saturn’s huge moon which has an atmosphere of nitrogen and methane and which features monsoon-like rainstorms and rivers and lakes on the surface. The instrument, called CIRS for Composite Infrared Spectrometer, with components built in the UK, functioned perfectly for more than a decade and a host of new findings resulted. The most exciting was the many similarities found between the weather and climate on Titan and those on Earth, despite huge differences in temperature.

Three billion years ago, the Earth may have been a pale orange dot. The first atmosphere was rich in methane and related hydrocarbons, which covered the globe with an orange, smoggy haze like Titan’s. That would change drastically over the next billion years. According to some models, this orange haze entered a period about 2.5 billion years ago in which the methane haze disappeared and then reappeared again, blinking on and off several times like a loose light bulb. Then the methane disappeared for good as another gas, oxygen, took over the atmosphere. Life changed from using methane to using oxygen, and the Earth was terraformed. One thing about measuring the chemistry of an entire planet is that it’s hard to fit billions of years and gigatons of material onto a two-dimensional graph. Yet with oxygen, we can come surprisingly close. Three billion years ago was point A with little oxygen in the air, a state of anoxia. Now we are at point B, an “oxic” state with 20% oxygen. The line between point A and point B had some peaks and valleys along the way, but its trend was uphill. (This graph will play a central role in the next two chapters.) The geologist Donald Canfield and others have found evidence for wispy amounts of free oxygen as far back as 3 billion years ago. Oxygen increased in a trickle and then a flood. Canfield found that surprisingly high amounts of oxygen, possibly almost as high as today’s amounts, existed 2.1 billion years ago. Once the chemical key was found that unlocked oxygen, the atmosphere filled with this reactive gas, allowing other organisms to respire and grow in turn. In other other words, if the Doctor shows up in his TARDIS and invites to you time travel back to 2.1 billion years ago, you might be able to step outside and breathe the air, even without a hastily inserted plot device.

Let’s move to a vantage point a little quieter: the surface of the moon. It is so still that Neil Armstrong’s footprints remain undisturbed. The only reason the US flag there appears to “fly” is that a wire holds it up. The moon and Mercury stayed still as Mars, Venus, and Earth moved on down the road of geological development. The moon is a “steady” environment, a word whose Middle English roots are appropriately tangled with the word for “sterile.” Nothing moves on the moon, but in its sky Mars, Venus, and Earth move in their orbits, just as they moved on in complexity 4 billion years ago. Out of the whole solar system, Mars and Venus are the most like Earth in size, position, and composition. Mars is smaller, but Venus could be Earth’s twin in size. If Earth and Venus were separated at birth, then something happened to obscure the family resemblance: liquid water brought life. To chemists, liquid is the third phase of matter, between solid and gas, and its presence made all the difference. Mars gleams a bright blood red even to the naked eye, while Venus is choked with thick yellow bands of clouds. Mars is cold enough to have carbon dioxide snow, while Venus is hot enough to melt tin and boil water. Earth’s blue oceans and green continents provide a bright, primary contrast. These three siblings have drastically different fortunes. At first, they looked the same, colored with black mafic basalt and glowing red magma. The original planets were all so hot that their atmospheres were driven off into space. The oceans and the air came from within. Steam condensed into oceans on each planet’s cool basalt surface. Oceans changed the planet. Water is a transformative chemical, small yet highly charged, seeping into the smallest cracks, dissolving what it can and carrying those things long distances. Venus, Earth, and Mars do not look like the moon because they have been washed in water. Mars is dry now, but the Curiosity rover left no doubt that the red planet was first blue with water.