For more than two and a half billion years, life in the oceans thrived while the continents were believed to have been utterly barren.

This phone isn't utterly barren; an alarm clock, a calendar, a stopwatch, and rings for individual callers await, if you want them.

Nor was the land utterly barren.

Its soil is utterly barren and its atmosphere is a fog of pollution.

They had garrisoned several utterly barren Centaurian planets for what was vaguely called "reasons of policy", meaning that nobody knew why they had.

Areas the size of a Terrestrial continent became utterly barren, almost overnight.

When a region turned utterly barren its inhabi- tants must displace someone else, or die in the attempt.

Of the high country, about half is utterly barren, consisting of snow fields, glaciers, bare rock, lakes and stream beds.

Mercury was utterly barren; Venus had only insects; Mars had nothing higher than rodents.

Barbicane wished to be cautious, in case the projectile should land on a part of the moon which was utterly barren.