Images from Spaceship Earth

A cosmic vehicle has landed in the University Museum Groningen: Spaceship Earth, home to various forms and expressions of life. The renewed University Museum has reopened its doors with the opening exhibition ‘Spaceship Earth’. An exhibition that serves as a mirror: captain and guest curator Eva Rovers classifies and shows off the world around us – the world that scientists are curious about and want to understand, influence and improve.

It was American inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller who coined the term ‘Spaceship Earth’. He described our planet as a vulnerable and precious spaceship: a spaceship of which there is only one, and that we should take extra good care of. An idea that many astronauts, including Wubbo Ockels, also proclaim after having seen our small Earth from infinite space. With this exhibition, Rovers shows how the Museum’s collection reflects the Earth’s diversity: a biosphere in which everything is connected. In nine curiosity cabinets, Rovers takes you on a journey from the macrocosm to the microcosm, from breathing in the atmosphere, via the development of life from an ovum, to molecules such as the ‘buckyballs’ (named after, surprise: Buckminster Fuller).

A few photos from the Spaceship have already reached us. If you would like to know more, make sure to enter the Spaceship yourself. You can find it in the University Museum. Warning: may broaden your horizons.

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^{Photos: Elmer Spaargaren, text: Eelco Salverda, Communication UG}