I’ve been to see the class this year three times, now. The last two times, I talked about rockets and planets and moons. I showed them movies and pictures. We talked about science and engineering and space.
This time I started with Earth’s mid-ocean ridges. They already knew about plate tectonics, and some of them knew about mid-ocean ridges. We talked about hydrothermal vents and black smokers and the life that teams around them far under the see. And we talked about how when marine scientists first saw them in the 1970s, they were stunned that there was life down there and about how maybe we don’t know quite as much as we think we do about what life in strange, remote places would look like.
And then we talked looking for water and life in space.
We talked about surface and subsurface ice on Mars and the possibility that once upon a time there was running water on the surface. We talked about Europa orbiting around Jupiter possibly with oceans and water. And we talked about Enceladus orbiting around Saturn with geysers spewing into the black of space possibly from subsurface oceans.
And then of course we talked about Titan orbiting around Saturn with its yellow hydrocarbon haze. I showed them a picture of Titan taken from Cassini a while ago that captured a glint off a lake (a lake!) as the sun was rising.
And then, I said, how the most amazing thing is what they saw when the zoomed in on that lake. How when they zoomed in on that lake in the northern hemisphere of Titan with the Sun rising after a 15-year night, they saw…
They saw…
They saw a yellow boat cruising along with tourists on the deck watching the Sun come up!
“April Fools, APRIL FOOLS!” cried two boys on the rug on the floor behind me.
I stood there in amaze looking at the class with my jaw agape for a couple seconds. They gawked back in stunned, wary silence, first at me and then at the picture of the yellow boat on the screen.
“April Fools!” the boys yelled again.
I smiled and said, “Yes, April Fools.”