Takes one to know one

I went to the Miraikan today, which is cool for many reasons. Let's start with the name. The formal name is National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, but it's called Future Building/Center for short. Both neat. The building itself is as futuristic looking as you'd hope, with its spherical planetarium screen bulging out of the front, and a curved glass curtain wall along one side.

The temporary exhibit up now is called Aliens, and it's really well done. It starts off with images of aliens in pop culture throughout history, from old religious paintings to the grainy alien autopsy movie on a loop (with offensive alien parts mosaic-ed out, per Japanese law). Lucasfilm lent the museum stuff from their collection, including scenes from ET and a whole Ewok. A toothy alien from Alien looms at the entrance, and a partially dissected rubber cast of the star of Alien Autopsy prompted a few visitors to ask each other if it was, um, real. There's a heavy phone receiver you can pick up to hear an original recording of War of the Worlds.

Deep sea creatures in jars, plastic bug eyes, and rubber tapeworms and Venus flytraps demonstrate ways life adapts to different terrestrial conditions. A bank of microscopes focused on slides of bacteria that live in acid, without oxygen, under ice, and whose only nutrition is the rocks they eat set the stage for other lifeforms that might thrive in extremes.

That exhibit segues easily into projections of what aliens might look like, given theoretical atmospheric parameters on made-up planets. The hypothetical aliens battle each other on touch screen games.

Finally, the room on communication gives a brief history of projects to make and receive contact, including an explanation and image of the "wow" signal, and audio recordings of some of the multilingual greetings we've sent up. (Opera on a golden record? Who knew.)

It ends with a kiosk where you can snap a digital picture of yourself and send it off with a four-panel symbol picture attached. You use a rollerball to choose from (dubiously universal) icons like books and rockets and hearts and exclamation points. I'm not sure where the messages actually go, but the projection screen implied they rocket out into the universe.

The communication "zone" urges visitors to "imagine trying to read something in a language you can't understand." Easy. Happily, the English was good throughout, so the information was clear - even for an alien.