Jump to content

Wikipedia:Main Page history/2023 October 17

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Welcome to Wikipedia

,
6,729,985 articles in English

From today's featured article

A 1939 magazine cover featuring "The Golden Amazons of Venus"
A 1939 magazine cover featuring "The Golden Amazons of Venus"

The planet Venus has been used as a setting in fiction since before the 19th century. Its impenetrable cloud cover gave writers free rein to speculate on conditions at Venus's surface, which was often depicted as warmer than Earth's but habitable. Images of a lush, verdant paradise, an oceanic planet, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like beasts or other monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly from the 1930s to the 1950s. Some stories portrayed the surface as a desert, or invented more exotic settings. Venusians were often portrayed as gentle, ethereal, beautiful, and female, after the Roman goddess Venus. Since the discovery of Venus's harsh surface conditions, the planet has mostly been portrayed as a hostile, toxic inferno. Some stories have imagined the planet's colonization and terraforming, although the vision of a tropical Venus has occasionally been revisited in intentionally retro stories. (Full article...)

Recently featured:

Did you know ...

Margaret Elwyn Sparshott
Margaret Elwyn Sparshott

In the news

Daniel Noboa in March 2022
Daniel Noboa

On this day

October 17:

King David II of Scotland
King David II of Scotland
More anniversaries:
A black and white photograph of the Holmdel Horn Antenna

The Holmdel Horn Antenna is a large microwave horn antenna that was used as a satellite communication antenna and radio telescope during the 1960s at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, United States. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1988 because of its association with the research work of two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who used it to discover the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) that permeates the universe. This helped change the science of cosmology, the study of the history of the universe, from a field for unlimited theoretical speculation into a discipline of direct observation. In 1978, Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.

Photograph/Painting/etc. credit: NASA; restored by Bammesk

Other areas of Wikipedia

  • Community portal – The central hub for editors, with resources, links, tasks, and announcements.
  • Village pump – Forum for discussions about Wikipedia itself, including policies and technical issues.
  • Site news – Sources of news about Wikipedia and the broader Wikimedia movement.
  • Teahouse – Ask basic questions about using or editing Wikipedia.
  • Help desk – Ask questions about using or editing Wikipedia.
  • Reference desk – Ask research questions about encyclopedic topics.
  • Content portals – A unique way to navigate the encyclopedia.

Wikipedia's sister projects

Wikipedia is written by volunteer editors and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other volunteer projects:

Wikipedia languages