“We must stay six feet apart from each other, but not from the Earth.”
Airline travel has ground to a halt, together with all the grubby side effects associated with it — the kabuki theatre of airport security; 300+ passengers crammed into a departure lounge designed to comfortably accommodate 40 or so; hostile flight attendants working cattle class as though it were a prison shift; the passenger in the seat next to you spewing germs like a bad scene out of 12 Monkeys, and so on.
That said, technology is allowing just about anyone with a working internet connection to visit virtually anywhere in the world the blink of an electronic eye. Searches for the phrase “virtual tour” jumped sevenfold between February and March, from 1,300 to more than 10,000, according to Google’s Keyword Planner, which is a lot of searching to ease the boredom of lockdown.
And while London’s Natural History Museum failed to make Forbes’ largely US-centric list of the world’s 15 most-visited virtual tours — though the National Gallery, also in London, did clock in at No. 10, no pun intended — there’s something about nature that proves especially appealing during these times of lockdowns and sheltering-in-place.
The Natural History Museum was already well on its way to digitizing its eye-filling displays long before Covid-19 unleashed itself on an unsuspecting world in late February.
The august museum, first established in 1881 and now residing in sprawling heritage buildings at the corner of Kensington and Chelsea in London SW7, launched an online programme dubbed the Urban Nature Project late last year, alongside a five-year plan to renovate and redesign the museum’s five-acre outdoor gardens. The idea is to create a scientific “living lab” that will focus on urban wildlife. The project involves both education and research, which will be shared with scientists and other museums around the world. The project is due for completion in 2023, Covid or no Covid, and has the backing of not just museum donors and the board of trustees but a coalition of museums and wildlife organizations from Australia to Zimbabwe.
The Covid crisis has jumpstarted a comprehensive redesign and reboot of the museum’s online service, complete with an interactive guided tour conducted by longtime patron David Attenborough of the museum’s famed Hintze Hall, where visitors gather under a 25-metre skeleton of a blue whale, the world’s largest mammal, suspended in the air, before moving on to other halls in the museum. Among the interactive highlights: a mock-up of an American mastodon, the elephant’s Ice Age ancestor, a rock as old as the solar system, a 122-million-year-old Mantellisaurus and one of the most complete dinosaur fossils ever discovered, and fossilized trees that span hundreds of millions of years of our planet’s geological history.
It’s the blue whale, though, that’s likely to draw the most attention, in person and online, in part because it’s still with us today, albeit in dwindling numbers, and in part because, of all the world’s animals, it perhaps best represents Attenborough’s still-beating heart. (The blue whale’s heart itself weighs some 182 kilograms or 400 lbs., and beats about 13 times a minute. That’s noteworthy because research scientists working managed to capture the first recording of a blue whale’s beating heart only last summer, by attaching a heart rate monitor to a whale swimming and diving in California’s Monterey Bay. This isn’t junk science, either; the research team’s findings were published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)
The best online experiences are playful and light-hearted, as well as educational and edifying. Here’s Sir David playfully introducing the Night at the Museum-inspired trailer to his IMAX feature Natural History Museum Alive.
It’s not the same as being there. It never is. In the early days of the Sixth Mass Extinction, however, during the Age of Covid, it’s perhaps the best any of us have a right to expect.
