Are Stars Scary?

Let’s take a break from black holes and come home to Earth for a bit. A while back I was in line at a store and was talking to the person ahead of me about what I do. (I was wearing a Hubble Space Telescope t-shirt, which tipped her off, I suppose, that I might be one of THOSE people…)

She asked me if there was anything in the sky that could scare kids. She wanted to take her 8-year-old son to the Museum of Science to look through a telescope, but didn’t want him to get scared. I asked her if he was easily scared and she said that he wasn’t. So I asked what she was worried about. She finally admitted that she thought he might learn something that would scare him, like the fact that our Sun might go supernova.

Now that’s an interesting concept-the possibility of our Sun blowing up as a frightening thing to an eight-year-old child. Most kids I know of that age are really INTO making explosive noises, and their cartoons are chock-full of such stuff. So, there had to be something more to this concern. In the course of our conversation, it became pretty clear that she didn’t want her child to be frightened by science and she was worried that astronomy might have too much violence for a young child.

Just to allay any concerned folks who may be reading this, the Sun isn’t going to go supernova. Its death is going to be more gentle, as star death goes, and it isn’t going to happen for five billion years or so. So, there’s not much to worry about in the near term, and certainly not for an eight-year-old.

I think what intrigued me about this mom’s concern was that her son would get scared of something like this simply by looking through a telescope at other stars. I did mention to her that looking at stars is normally something very enjoyable and thought-provoking. And, I did point out that looking at the Sun was NOT a good idea and I wouldn’t recommend it. I told her that the folks at the museum usually look at planets, especially since those are easy to find in light-polluted skies.

She decided that would be cool, so I guess one of these nights, her son will get to see some celestial delights through a big telescope. I can just about guarantee that he won’t be scared. But he might come home and want a telescope…

We Didn’t Need Spacesuits, Just Cardboard

AS you might imagine after reading the past few posts, I’ve got Mars on the brain. It’s almost genetic, but not quite. Back when I was a kid, living on a farm in Boulder, Colorado, we had a game we played. I don’t remember the name of the game, but let’s call it “Going to Mars.” This was back before we’d landed folks on the Moon. I’d read somewhere about Mars and since the solar system was in the news, I’m guessing we decided to make a game of it.

We got a big cardboard box and put it out in a field. That was our rocket. We stood in it and made lots of rocket noises like we’d heard on TV during launches. And, after a while, we somehow landed on Mars. Never mind that Mars was basically an alfalfa field. To us, it was Mars. And we explored our Mars and found all kinds of cool things.

When I was a few years old, I read the first of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Mars and found out that John Carter basically got to Mars by standing in a cave and teleporting himself there. Very cool… we both got there by imagination, which is great.

Well, about a decade ago, I shared that childhood game with the world in the form of a planetarium show called SkyQuest. It’s about a little girl who grows up to be an astronomer and how she played astronaut games as a child. There’s a short sequence in the show where she builds her rocket and goes to Mars, but most of SkyQuest is about her interest in the stars and planets.

In a way, the show parallels some of my life story, and I’ve had many planetarium folk tell me that it reminded them of cardboard rockets and space exploration games they played as kids, too. What this tells ME is that we need both science education AND imagination to make future astronomers and astronauts