From the Secretary: The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see
The idea of traveling through time is fascinating to most of us. From Rip Van Winkle’s decades-long nap and the ancient Hindu story of King Revaita, who found that ages had passed on Earth during his short visit to heaven, to the movie “Back to the Future” and countless other films and novels, imagining that we can relive the past and foresee the future is enthralling.
Forensic anthropologist Doug Owsley examines a grave (1726) in the brick Jamestown Church cemetery, in Jamestown, Va. (Photo by Chip Clark)
The Smithsonian offers a unique perspective for a modern time traveler. Moving back from the present, our collections document American identity and creative spirit from the earliest colonial settlements and our fight for independence through artifacts that reflect personal and national achievement, including Thomas Edison’s light bulb, Joe Louis’ boxing gloves, John Glenn’s spacesuit and political paraphernalia from the last presidential election.
If we step much farther back, to roughly 25,000 years ago, our horizons broaden to encompass the first humans in the Americas. Since its beginnings, the Smithsonian has been studying the native peoples of North, Central and South America, including the Caribbean. The Institution—through our Natural History and American Indian museums—holds one of the world’s largest collections of artifacts, art and photography reflecting 1,200 different native cultures that extend back some 12,000 years.
The Recovering Voices Program at the Natural History Museum, in partnership with the Museum of the American Indian and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Programs, collaborates with indigenous communities to document and sustain the world’s endangered languages. Among other collections, the program draws on the National Anthropological Archives’ manuscript collection of Native American languages—the world’s largest—as well as countless audio recordings.
An ivory polar bear carved by Moses Pungowiwi (Siberian Yupik), St. Lawrence Island, Bering Strait, Alaska, ca. 1955. From the Indian Arts and Crafts Board Collection, Department of the Interior, at the American Indian Museum. (Photo by Ernest Amoroso)
Our next stop on the Smithsonian timeline: about 4 million years ago when early hominids began to walk upright. The Smithsonian began collecting and studying Paleolithic materials in the 19th century. Next year, the Natural History Museum will open the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, with a special focus on human adaptability to a changing environment and the impact of climate change on human evolution.
Fifty-five million years ago, there was a period of relatively rapid global warming, during which the average surface temperature of the Earth rose by four to eight degrees Celsius, and the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide reached levels perhaps triple those today. Smithsonian paleontologists are studying that period’s fossilized leaves, which provide a rough thermometer of temperatures, a rain gauge, and a measure of climate change-driven plant migration. Their studies of the far past have important implications for our own future.
The spacesuits Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore in July 1969 as the first humans on the moon are displayed in the Air and Space Museum's "Apollo to the Moon" gallery. (Photo by Eric Long)
For Smithsonian astrophysicists, telescopes act something like time machines, taking us back to the moment when the light left the object we see today. In the course of one year, light travels roughly 5.9 trillion miles. This is a light-year—one way of measuring distances in astronomy.
When the Smithsonian’s MMT telescope in Arizona takes an image of the Whirlpool Galaxy in the process of colliding with a smaller galaxy, we are gathering light that left those galaxies some 23 million years ago. Recently, astronomers captured the light from a gamma ray burst that occurred 13 billion years ago, some 600 million years after the universe formed.
Our collections include the oldest known natural specimen on Earth—the Allende meteorite. This ancient visitor from space is 4.57 billion years old and contains not only diamonds created from dozens of supernovas but also amino acids that might have provided the raw materials for early life on Earth.
Winston Churchill once said: “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.” We preserve our collections for an indeterminate future; we are engaged in an effort to learn more about our history stretching back through time even to the creation of the universe but we also believe that an understanding of the past and how our world works is essential if we are to create a sustainable future here on Earth.
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Posted: 1 December 2009
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