jay_walk

I went to a museum in Russia on spaceflight and it was awesome.
And that icon is Luna 2. It actually existed and it actually went to the moon. To me it looks like an illustration to a really old fanciful science-fiction story. The ones where they still believed in martian civilization and spaceflight looked like diving bells with antennae. So it turns out that old science fiction is pretty much like reality when it was written (a lot of people did believe in martian canals still).
Soviet and Russian spaceflight has such nice aesthetics.
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I could potentially actually make a post per day. I have a lot of free time and a lot of free brain-space. As well as technically an obligation to practice writing fiction on a regular basis, and a lot of opinions on a lot of things. I seem to be in a phase where the general topic is comparing stuff I found in various mythologies and especially in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Golden Bough to modern science and culture.
And yeah I'll get around to figuring out the rest of this thing outside of posting... hopefully soon and not in three weeks when the school year's over and I really have no more excuses.

So I went to the planetarium.
Humanity is very egocentric. They told us how everything from the beginning of the universe to now happened to contribute to us, the most amazing thing ever, existing. We are the most amazing thing ever because we can think about ourselves and our existence, apparently. I learned nothing about space because my brain was too busy making sarcastic comments and having argumentative reactions. So many gratuitous metaphors. "traffic accidents" "birth" "birthing rooms" "power plants". This just jarringly disrupts thinking about stars for me in favor of thinking about how the writers either for themselves or because they think it entertains the audience better had to make everything about us.
And there was a lot of orchestral accompaniment. Apparently it's rooted in everyone's mind that supernovae etc. should go well with majestic orchestral music. Which is rather illogical really, space is silent, neither explosions nor things slowly orbiting around fit the swelling majestic tempo, and violin music is a very human thing that doesn't really connect with space.

The whole thing was storytelling. It was the modern version of Genesis in that it had the general theme of everything coming into existence in a fixed order in preparation for the eventual existence of humans. There are some similarities to other creation myths too: The theme of each generation of stars/gods dying to create the world for the next generation and for humans, the theme of the world being made out of their remains (Ymir, Titans)*. With a sort of storytelling ritual too, via an illuminated dome and loudspeakers and background music. People used to achieve the same effect with amphitheaters and costumed performances and songs and drugs. Its funny because planetaria look very sciencefictiony, advanced, and enlightened, but its the same thing as always.

Very cool setting too (before they start the projecting), artificial-daylight illuminated white dome. Feels like old science fiction depictions of utopian enlightened places. I am quite sure I saw the same type of thing in quite a few Star Trek episodes.
The projector looks like a pre-70s science fiction gun.

Space is very empty. Maybe that's why they put so much orchestra and how important humans are in the whole thing. Or maybe I'm over-philosophising and all that "and all of this created you" is just to entertain and interest people.

I did learn where north is. You follow the front two stars of the big dipper, they point to the north star, which points north. Well, that's good to know.

*mythology I can name right now is very Europe-centric