The Natural History Museum always has fun with its big, slick temporary exhibitions: for 2025 it poses one of the biggies – are we alone out there? Helpfully (and possibly even deliberately) running while the neighbouring Science Museum’s 40-year-old Exploring Space exhibition is being taken down and reworked, Could Life Exist Beyond Earth? is pretty self-explanatory in what it’s asking.
At time of writing we haven’t in fact discovered intelligent life out there and this exhibit probably won’t be getting bogged down in what aliens might want from us. But it will be focussing on the geological side of space: the NHM’s collections aren’t all just taxidermied Victorian wildlife – it owns some of the world’s most important space rocks, many of which will be on display here. We’re promised the opportunity to snap a selfie with a piece of Mars, touch a fragment of the Moon and lay your hands on the Allende meteorite, which is, remarkably, older than Earth itself.
Although it’s hard to imagine any child not being thrilled by a collection of very, very old rocks, there will be lots of fun other stuff besides including the opportuinit to guide a rover over rocky ‘Martian’, decide what equipment to take with you on a space mission, listen to the sounds of Mars and smell the smells of outer space.
