This morning our first port of call was the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which is stuffed to the gunnels with fascinating history and historical objects. Our visit included a viewing of the highly entertaining and educational film Journey to the Stars in the IMAX theatre. The film includes an excellent account of how scientists think the universe was created and what that process looked like. By chance, I am currently reading Olaf Stapledon’s great science fiction classic, Starmaker, and realised that I was visualising what Stapledon had imagined with extraordinary accuracy in 1937. Stapledon’s book is not great literature but it is clearly a major work of the human imagination.