From Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line:
I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television.
And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him.
Such is the experience I imagine on Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope. I wouldn’t know actually, it doesn’t work on a Mac. Nevertheless, according to his latest column in Fast Company, it brought a tear to Robert Scoble’s eyes.
The other night, the Boy Genius and I spent a few hours in the dark with my telescope. We watched Ganymede slip behind Jupiter. We peered through the inky darkness to find the Lagoon Nebula. And as a finale before bed time we looked at Albireo, a beautiful blue and gold double star in Cygnus.
The sights in my 6 inch reflector certainly can’t rival those of the Hubble, or what you can see on Google Sky or the World Wide Telescope. But they are the real deal, the actual photons traveling for hundreds, thousands or even millions of years, in some cases a vew into the very history of the Universe itself, hitting the back of my eyes.
There’s simply no substitute for looking up yourself at the night sky. It’s what links us to our earliest ancestors who looked up and drew patterns in the skies to illustrate stories and try to make some sense of their own place in the Universe. It’s where the very building blocks of our bodies came from. And if we manage to survive the coming centuries, it’s probably where we are going.
Sitting in front of a monitor, looking at artificially colored and processed images is no substitute for the real deal. It’s just another example of how we look for representations of our reality, instead of experiencing reality first-hand.
