I don’t expect this to be found by any Humans, so I’ll give some context. Humans come from a planet called The Earth. The Earth orbits a yellow star in the natively named Milky Way Galaxy. Humans first left The Earth about 1,900 years after we started keeping measured track of time (in the “20th century”), although we only went to our moon at the time. A little under 200 years later we managed to go to the next furthest planet from our star in their solar system (Mars). Half a century later Humans cracked light speed travel and began to explore beyond The Earth’s solar system.
Humans always recalled wanting to explore “the stars”, so leaving our native solar system, and quickly after the galaxy, was natural after engineering the means to do so. I won’t explain any of our “first contacts” with other lifes or history in the wider universe since you almost assuredly already know.
After becoming an established entry in the wider universe, setting up interstellar civilizations, integrating into other lifes’ systems, yadda yadda (you know all this), humans did as humans do and began “tooling” the wider universe, for lack of a better term. For example, the main subject of this article: The Edge of The Observable Universe.
“The Edge of The Observable Universe” is a human founded and targeted attraction traveling directly away from The Earth at just under light speed approximately 46.6 billion light years away from The Earth. The stated purpose is to provide people with the experience of being as far away from The Earth while still “being visible” to “home”. Experts on the topics of quantum physics, astrophysics, and general space travel have numerously detested and condemned the site for being misleading and inaccurate on how light travels, distances operate in space, the nature of the physical universe, etc. The Edge of The Observable Universe has obviously denied these accusations, claiming that they serve as an educational facility for an underrepresented life, and that the only exit being located in the gift shop is merely an architectural coincidence.
Humans are incredibly traditional and iconoclastic and hold our history and preserving it in high regard, even if it’s done so poorly (for example most currently surviving accounts of The Earth’s mid first millennium history are forms of entertainment including, most popularly, plays, dramatic reenactments, and a series of rom-coms made partially to mock both the genre and the time period). This is why most of the exhibits housed at The Edge of The Observable Universe are incredibly, and some would say insultingly, focused on ancient Human understandings of “space” (the wider universe). For example, one room houses a diorama of The Earth’s solar system, with each planet represented through a small ball that could comfortably fit in a Human’s hand to demonstrate the scale of the solar system and distance between planets. In the next room over there’s a similar display, this time with a ball representing the Milky Way Galaxy and another representing The Edge of The Observable Universe on the opposite side of the room. The impact of the latter exhibit is marginally less meaningful.
The gift shop contains most oddities you’d expect at a site like this: clothing for Humans, magnetic emblems, commemorative utility items of dubious quality, and keychains (all overpriced just enough to be a rip-off but not enough to dissuade the average tourist from purchasing a few items). My personal favorite item was a stack of posters depicting an oversized cartoony house on top of The Earth behind a group of Humans waving with the words “Wish You Were Here” that looked like it hadn’t been touched since the shuttle first launched.
As mentioned above, the gift shop houses the only exit. Fun Fact: when constructing The Edge of The Observable Universe, the founders debated making the exit airlock only open if the exiting visitor/group had made a purchase at the gift shop. After an early test flight, the pilots found that they could not exit the shuttle due to there not being any merchandise on board, and were only able to escape after it had been nearly completely taken apart. The idea was never fully implemented.
Frankly speaking, The Edge of The Observable Universe is truly a tourist trap. It offers no significant educational value (or entertainment value, honestly) to its visitors. Its target audience, being Humans, are likely to have never even been to The Earth due to the extraordinary distance from it and simply visit “for posterity” or to feel “closer to their roots”, resulting in the large majority of visitors being families in the area while on a road trip who decide to take a quick detour to visit a “neat heritage site”. Anyone else is likely to get even less value out of visiting, as even an intermediate anthropology course is likely to completely ruin all information presented since you’d be able to instantly know exactly where and how most of the information displayed is wrong.
Despite having a seemingly high maintenance standard, the interior of the shuttle is always in a state of being slightly rundown and outdated. This description also perfectly fits most of the exhibits on the shuttle, which can be safely considered to be laughably inaccurate and ignorant even before they were built. In addition to the narrow-viewed models described above, other exhibits include shoddily written descriptions of how light travels (complete with a light switch to turn a lamp on and off to showcase “just how fast it is”) and a wooden model shuttle that can be pushed along a line suspended from the ceiling (not sure what the point of that one is). This, again, is emblematic of the overall attraction: pointless, fundamentally flawed, and bad. The Edge of The Observable Universe is a borderline scam that no one has any reason to go to. Do Not Visit.
Comments
Post a Comment