A while back, I made a podcast that steve set to video (see above). In the podcast I asked the participants to talk about when they became interested in the topic of space exploration.
ecib talked about how most kids have a fascination. He mentions that his nephew is fascinated by dump-trucks. He goes on to say that for him, "space was my dump-truck."
What was/is your dump truck?
I can't recall what I was in to as a very young kid, but from the age of ten on, I was an avid Beatles fan. I'd say, #thebeatles were my dump-truck.
My dump-truck was/is fantasy. I remember I used to tell stories to anyone willing to listen. I remember they could be short little tales, or long drawn out stories (My grandmother used to say she loved the long ones). I remember it started at a pretty young age with stuff like LotR, and Harry Potter. Among the many tales I was always a huge fan of King Arthur, and his magic sword. I always thought to myself that one day I would create something like that. I would build a world filled with stories of heroes and magic. I grew up, but never really outgrew that love for fantasy. I took some creative writing course in college along with a few mythology course just to keep learning in a more academic sense. I'd like to say that as I work on my epic fantasy piece that I am fulfilling that promise I made to myself to build a world filled with heroes and magic.
When I was 7, every other kid was into dinosaurs; I was into space. The Pioneers were a thing, the Mariners were a thing, the Vikings were a thing. I got my first telescope that Christmas, and it sucked. It was small, the tripod sucked, it was hard to aim, and the optics were sub-sub par. Yet, I was able to look at the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and get hooked. That summer we went to an event with a bunch of telescope makers and was able to see my first globular cluster in a 6" scope. Ever since then, my head has been in the heavens.
I actually watched that podcast last week! Are you going to be making more? I think my dump-truck would have been robotics, it was something I liked reading about and I would come up with all sorts of ideas for stuff I could make if I could just have had a Lego Mindstorms kit. I subscribed to Real Robots magazine which came with parts to build a small (and very stupid) robot. There was some problems with the company and they mucked everything up, eventually we just cancelled it -- I am actually surprised there was so much more released after we stopped, and am very sad that we stopped before the programming phase as that was what I was interested in. I have since left robotics behind, it's always been that path I'd have liked to take and I hope to be able to work some of it into teaching.
"Is America trying to win a culture victory?" In the civilization games, one of the options to win is to assimilate other nations into submission through overwhelming cultural export. The game lampshades that it's primarily american culture, with one of the AI leaders taunts being "Our people are buying your blue jeans and listening to your pop music... I worry the rest of the world will fall under the influence of your culture." I think it could be interesting to look at how pervasive American culture has become globally, touching upon cargo cults and the pervasiveness of big brands, then ask whether that has diminished in recent years as peoples sensibilities have changed and the global perception of America has shifted post war -- or is it still growing better than ever? Finally, what would be the end state of all this, has the internet made it more difficult for America to win a complete takeover or has it made it easier for other cultures to fight back, what would a victory or a defeat look like? I recently read Larry Niven's Ringworld and one of the things that struck me was how instant global teleportation had blended cultures together into one mono-culture, leaving there to be little variation with each hub city across the world having the exact same stores and selling the exact same products. With how fast shipping, travel and communication are now I think he was pretty spot on, though it still feels like America is dominating other cultures contributions to this.
When I was really young, it was probably fairies and poetry, but that's not very interesting. My dump-truck when I was 8 was the United Nations. I read everything I could get my hands on about the League of Nations and the development of international leagues. I read the official purpose statements of departments within the UN. I was the most enthusiastic trick-or-treater for UNICEF out there. For my birthday one year, I had my parents take me to the UN headquarters in Manhattan. Eventually, I created a national flag for the climbing tree in my front yard, along with a currency (dried leaves), holidays, and banking credit system (dried leaves are a bad system for storing and transferring value). I allocated branches as fiefdoms for my family and friends and then began working on an application for membership status in the UN, in colored pencils. Once I got into computers, I didn't have another dump-truck like that until I was 12 and filled an entire shelf just with books about Balkan history.