As universes go by...

There's a short documentary by the National Film Board of Canada, from 1960, that's sort of haunted me for a while now. Called Universe, in about half an hour, it frames our understanding of the cosmos at the dawn of the Space Age, and bookends the work of an astronomer at the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill, Ontario, one of the most important in North America at the time. It still exists. In 1960, it was half an hour or more out in the countryside. Today, it's surrounded by suburbs.

There are two moments in the documentary that speak to me personally. The first occurs a little over eight minutes in. Speaking of the planet Mars, the narrator tells us that "It is reasonably certain that the markings on it surface, bluish-green in the Martian summer, turning rusty brown in the autumn, indicate vegetation..."

And it does haunt me. This is a moment in history when we could still imagine there was complex, multicellular life on Mars. Only five years later, those millennia-old illusions would be dashed forever by the fly-by of Mariner 4. But in 1960, when my parents and some of my friends were already alive, less than a decade before I was born, you could still dream. And what dreams they were.

The other is a more earthbound moment. At the very end of the documentary, as the astronomer is rubbing his tired eyes at the end of a long night in the light of dawn, there is a shot of Hwy 401 at the Leslie Street interchange. I know this interchange well; I've lived walking distance from it for 21 years now. In fact, I know it well enough to tell you that the NFB was cheating; that the view faces west, so is in fact an evening shot, not a morning shot. It was taken from the vicinity of the on-ramp from southbound Woodbine Avenue, which no longer exists... it's now Hwy 404 north of the 401 and the Don Valley Parkway south of it. My guess is that the NFB crew stopped (that's probably their car on parked on the right there) and took video of it on their way out of the downtown north to the observatory. Two lanes on either side, the 401 back then was out in the countryside, bypassing the city, and had it been a human child, would have been facing the prospect of starting kindergarten at the time.

For comparison, I took a video of nearly the same location in 2008 at night, shot from the bridge of Don Mills Road (not to be confused with the Don Valley Parkway), which would have been visible in the shot above except that it Don Mills Road didn't cross the 401 until about 1965.

Universe had some interesting ramifications. Ostensibly, Stanley Kubrik was inspired by aspects of it when he went on to film 2001: A Space Odyssey. As well, it was narrated by Douglas Rain, whom Kubrik chose to voice HAL, the computer from 2001 and its 1980s sequel, 2010. If you're at all interested in seeing it, it's a pleasant 28 minutes of what-was and what-if, and can be viewed here. It amazes me that people still alive today took this as the state of things, and have had the universe itself change around them.