Reality

Apparently Eddie thinks Superman is real. Sometimes on a long bike ride, if Eddie's been quiet a long time, I ask if he's still there, which led to this conversation:

E: "Why do you wonder if I am still on the bike? How could I get off the bike when the bike is going?" (He is surrounded by "monkey bars," so he couldn't really fall off.)

P: "Well, a dragon might fly down and pick you up in its claws and fly off."

E: "No! Dragons aren't real!"

P: "Oh, well maybe a really big bird would fly down and pick you up in its claws."

E: "No! Really big birds aren't real! They're only in that magazine." (Eddie was referring to a Donald Duck comic book with a roc.)

P: "Oh. Well maybe Superman would fly down and pick you up."

E: "Why would Superman pick me up?"

P: "I don't know."

E: "Well Superman lives really far away. If he flew all the way here he would be too tired to pick me up."

It's hard to distinguish reality from make-believe when you're five years old. We tell kids stories about witches and wizards, or dinosaurs, or aliens, or astronauts, or superheros, or firefighters, without any caveats about what's real or not.

Eddie seems to know that dragons and wizards aren't real, and that rocket ships, space travel, and aliens are more real, but he's starting to realize that our real-life space program is a lot more limited than what he's seen in stories. (I wonder what he thinks about knights, kings, and castles, who are always associated with dragons and wizards.) We had a conversation about that a week or two ago.

I told him that we didn't know if aliens were real, because nobody had ever seen one. He was very surprised by this, and asked why not.

"Well," I said, "we haven't explored very much. The only other world humans have been to is the moon, and there weren't any aliens there. There are probably aliens somewhere in the universe, around another star, but there probably aren't any in our solar system."

"Maybe they are on Mars," he suggested.

"I don't think so," I said. "No humans have been to Mars, but we've sent some robots to look around, and they didn't find any signs of life."

"ROBOTS?!?" said Eddie.

First I told him that alien stories were all make-believe, now I'm telling him that robots are real‽

Eddie wanted to know lots more about that. I told him that they weren't "robots with faces" (Eddie's term for androids) and showed him pictures of Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity.