looking forward (with bright eyes)


2005-1-26

I'm in the process of fouling up my four-year-old son's sense of reality. I recently got myself the 'The Future Is Wild' DVD. It's a speculative look into (possible) future directions of evolution in 5, 100 and 200 million years (or was the english term 'billion' for the german 'million'?), done in the style of the BBC dinosaur series.

We - my son and I - are watching about one of the 19 episodes per day as a kind of bedtime-story on my trusty TiBook in bed. This programme is purly speculative, but it is persented in a way that makes it easy to forget that fact. Todays fana and flora is referred to as 'back in the time of man'. I'm fairly sure little Raphael has his difficulties to discern fiction and reality in this case...

Being a very big fan of Science Fiction and also of - what I call - alternative thinking, I really don't have a problem puting him into that dillema. I was a great dino-lover at his age and beyond. And dinos are usually seen as something that has been and we usually assume the image that we are presented of them as fact. Hard scientific fact. But apart from the bones we find we know very lizzle about them for a fact. How they looked, how they behaved, what color they were. We all to easily forget that all those images are speculation. Well educated guesses, but guesses just the same.

Inj that aspect I find these future animals far more honest. There's no question they are speculation. No one would want to say they were any kind of truth. But these speculations are just as sound and well educated as most of the 'facts' we know about dinos. All are built from what we know about evolution, natures laws etc.

And I really love the fact that I can let my little boy dream about 'what could be' rather than 'what maybe was'. I'd rather have him look forwards with bright eyes towards what might still come that backwards with regret towards what has already passed.

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