With: Michael Shara
Saturday, November 12: 1:00 pm

Kaufmann Theater

From Georges Méliès's whimsical portrayal of astronomers landing on the soft-cheese surface of the moon in 1902's Le voyage dans la lune through the action-packed apocalypses of more recent movies, filmmakers have always had something to say about outer space. If there is a lesson to be learned from these fictional prophecies about the nature of interplanetary and interstellar travel, it's that technology rarely advances in the direction predicted on screen. Depictions that come closest to reality are based in physics and mathematics, and a few are remarkably prescient. Astrophysicist and Museum curator Michael Shara tests this hypothesis with a clip show covering 100 years of science-fiction cinema. Shara will also speculate about what our descendants' trips out of Earth's orbit might look like, inviting audience predictions about what the future holds for space exploration.

Michael Shara is curator of the upcoming exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, which opens at the American Museum of Natural History on November 19.

Part of the series Dreams of Outer Space in conjunction with Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration