When do we walk on Saturn?
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- July
- 20
I was 7 when the first moon walk took place. When the second one came around, I was in the second grade, and we all sat down in the hallway at school to watch the grainy image on a black-and-white TV.
It was fascinating stuff for a kid.
How do you put that in perspective for today’s kids?
In an age where space shuttles are launched regularly, it’s incredibly obvious that kids today don’t understand the significance of that moment. My son even wonders why we would ever want to be on the moon. Saturn, now that would be cool.
The truth is that the technological generation gap between my generation and my son’s generation is remarkably vast. When I started college I took a computer class — for what that was worth relative to today.
We were using this massive mainframe, and my professor predicted that one day every home would have a computer.
We thought it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard. Well, there you have it. He must be sitting back in retirement now repeating the professorial version of “I told you so.”
Either way, events like the moon walk were hallmark events in my childhood, as was each new development in the space program. At one point we all kind of became jaded, and kids my son’s age just take it for granted that we can launch people into space with pretty good regularity.
So, where are the hallmark events for our kids?
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on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 9:43 am by Jorge Fitz-Gibbon.
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Well, walking on Saturn would actually be impossible if you could get someone there. Saturn is a giant ball of gas that would actually float on water if you could find a body of water large enough to place it in. In fact if you attemoted to walk on Saturn, you would likely just keep falling into the center of the planet until you were subjected to such immense pressures that your body would be compressed to the size of a tennis ball. But that would likely not happen either since the internal temperature of Saturn is well over 10,000 degrees celsius and your body would long be vaporized. So to answer your question…. Never.