(The reflections of a psychologist after visiting an orbital habitat around the Earth in about a century's time, when the first generations of children born in space are growing up).
Jason never ceased to be amazed at the limits of people’s naivety. Despite the best education possible, despite even thousands of hours spent in VR, there was still no substitute for physically travelling to and from space. The journey up or down a space elevator was like some mysterious sieve that some perceptions simply couldn’t penetrate.
Newcomers from Earth always needed a period of adjustment in space. Something as simple as walking was naggingly different on the inside of a rotating Orbital habitat. Your sense of balance took some time to adjust; it took maybe a few weeks for people to stop thinking they were falling over with every step. The air, the ground and the watercourses, all were so unfailingly fresh. They lacked the billion year tinge so deeply ingrained in everything on Earth. Your surroundings lacked a fundamental taste your subconscious missed deeply. Something was wrong here!
For those born in space, as had been the case for millions of people over the last thirty-odd years, the change was infinitely stranger. Compared to an Orbital’s sterile environs the Earth was one great big wild sweaty jungle. How could harmless phenomenon like wind or rain or distant quakes in the ground hurt people? Preposterous!
Jason recalled a seemingly innocuous but deeply unsettling visit to an orbital elementary school a few years back. He’d looked in on a few classes with the principal, talking to teachers and students. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Then he’d come across one class, it’s pupils no older than ten, who’d been asked to spend an afternoon drawing scenes from the Earth, a place almost none of them had yet visited. Jason had stood there, fascinated, as their creative little minds went to work.
There were drawings of forests and rivers, towns and beaches. Many were perfectly fine, especially those depicting things that were also dotted about most Orbitals. But some looked truly bizarre to Jason, having been born and lived on Earth for nearly a century and having travelled their frequently since. There was a distinct lack of sunsets, mountains, clouds and oceans, things that were too big or unwieldy to recreate in space. For the most part the children’s knowledge was limited, but not too wildly wrong.
Then there was one boy who’d decided to draw a small armada of earthbound vehicles of various types. Planes, trains, boats and so on. It was so riddled with obvious errors Jason couldn’t help but stand there, rooted to the spot, and watch the boy draw. The train he’d drawn in a transparent tunnel as all modern vactrains were, yet it was a steam train, busily belching out clouds of black smoke. Modern maglev trains could only accelerate to many thousands of K’s a second without great friction by travelling along sealed tunnels with most of their air evacuated, but this detail seemed lost on the boy. He also didn’t seem to notice how quickly his passengers would suffocate.
Then there were the airplanes he’d drawn, which Jason was quite sure wouldn’t be flyable in a terrestrial atmosphere. They didn’t just have a pair of horizontal wings, but a pair of equally large vertical ones as well. This gave them the cross-section of a plus sign when viewed head on. The boy’s thinking quickly dawned upon Jason. While he may never have flown in an airplane, the closest thing he’d experienced was probably an inter-orbital shuttle or maybe even an inter-planetary Liner. Practically all spaceships were vertically and horizontally symmetrical. They had a front and back, but no need for a top or bottom. Space lacked a definite up. Why should planes follow any different rules?
Jason was quickly reminded of the old perceptions people back on Earth used to have of spaceships. Jason was old, but had still been born half a century after Star Wars came out. He’d seen it of course, and at the time couldn’t help but laugh whenever the millennium Falcon banked as it turned, or gaze in astonishment at the glass cockpits and bridges every vessel seemed to have, which while perfectly necessary on an Earthbound aircraft, would have been suicidally vulnerable in any kind of space battle. Ever earlier on was perhaps the most poorly conceived spacecraft of all time, the Space Battleship Yamato, from a Japanese comic series. It was literally a spacecraft built around the WW2-era wreck of the Yamato, and could hardly have been more impractical in space. Space battles in 20th century science-fiction always seemed to resemble a battle from the Pacific War. Large cruisers and aircraft carriers lumbered about while tiny fighters darted and dogfighted around them. The Battle of Endor might as well have been labelled ‘The Battle of Midway in space’.
Going even further back he had recalled the Martian’s invasion vessels in H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. They were not rockets, which hadn’t advanced beyond small fireworks in Wells’ time, but large capsules fired by an enormous gun on Mars and aimed at the Earth. The crushing acceleration the inhabitants of such capsules would experience when the gun was fired had seemed lost on Wells, and also Jules Verne now Jason thought about it. Even wise men, Jason had to remind himself quickly, could have utterly impractical visions of the future and other things they'd never laid eyes on.
Jason could perhaps have forgiven the boy for his mistakes so far, but he couldn’t help but crack an oddly horrified smile at the boy’s attempt at drawing a sailing ship. He’d tried to apply the same rules here as he had to the plane. The shape of the hull was about right, and it had a trio of rather well-drawn mainsails on it’s top, but that was where practically ended and the boy’s ignorance began. He’d also tried to drawn the same trio of sails three more times, on the ship’s sides and, best of all, it’s bottom. You could hardly have designed anything more impractical.
While there were numerous pools, ponds, rivers and even lakes on most Orbital habitats and the boy had surely learned how to swim, the vast difference between the skin of Earth’s atmosphere and the depths of it’s oceans seemed to have been completely lost on him. Jason had immediately taken a photograph of the drawing, much to the boy’s confusion and delight, and always brought it out whenever he was giving a lecture on the psychology of children born in space. It was just the kind of snapshot into people’s basic emotions he truly valued.
