Undiscovered Worlds: Trailer from Jason Fletcher on Vimeo.
My niece and nephew Milo and Annabelle were staying with Nana and I over the weekend, and because of that, I got to do things I never do. Not can't do, just, usually, don't. Read Harry Potter out loud. Play chess on the rug. Watch cartoons. Brush someone else's hair. And awesomest of all, go to the Science Museum.
What an amazing constructing of the high-tech, and the low. Annabelle put on a bee-striped cape, and climbed into a giant plastic honeycomb. Milo put on a grey squirrel cape, and raced around a climbing- fort clutching a giant acorn, declaiming MINE MINE in a way that I am sure a real squirrel would cheer.
A brilliant volunteer presented them with an enormous box of bones, and challenged them to assemble them back into a skeleton, without telling them what it was a skeleton of! With coaching and handling and speculation, together they slowly made sense of the parts until it became a creature, a monster, something more familiar--a bird! A really big one! Named at last: an ostrich. A pretty amazing demonstration of the deep satisfaction kids can get from hands, and touching stuff, and brains, and pictures in books, and a smart teacher.
On the other hand! We made our way to the Planetarium for the big planet show. I had vague recollection of a childhood visit, decades ago, mashed up in my head with Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" on a tiny television screen sometime in the eighties.
This was…whoa! Something absolutely transformed by the latest super duper technology of today. The projector looked like a deathstar, and worked like magic. The dome above us became an amazing canvas, a vivid dream, full of stars and suns and planets that filled the sky. We lay back in our chairs and felt as if we were flying over the horizon, then the solar system, then beyond. At times, Annabelle, sitting next to me, reached up her hands towards the vivid images of exploding stars and bright colored solar gasses, as if to touch the images that seemed to rain down on us. Milo practically staggered on the way out, mind-blown and yet deeply satisfied.
This is high-technology at its Highest, expensive, powerful, beautiful, and full of power. It struck me that whole lives had gone into the discoveries and theories that were being shown to us, the news of unimaginably distant worlds, the guesses and possibilities suggested by complex readings and measurements worked out from the farthest, farthest reaches the human race can currently touch with its brains, eyes, instruments.
There is a type of love in this work of science. A belief that from the little people filled with a sense of wonder today will come, in a few cases, more people called to work at the hard and painstaking work of building knowledge; and many others who might gain a lasting sympathy that might someday lead them to lend money, or business smarts, or a key vote, to the cause of teaching and transmitting and discovery. Or maybe one of those little figures in big sneakers weaves that lingering memory of wonder into the creative joy of story-telling, into animation, writing, moviemaking, and awakening people's curiosity and enjoyment through imagination.
It even made this grown-up, with her spongy and slightly battered brain and no longer minty-fresh cell structure, feel a renewed connection to the stars. I need to go out and look for that big moon again, tonight.
