On the geowanking e-mail list, Andy Armstrong reminded everybody that one of the greatest demonstrations of the power of maps comes from an educational movie made in the 1970s called Powers of Ten. Funded partly by NASA and IBM, it’s an 8-minute flick narrated with geeky abandon by PBS regular Philip Morrison and aims to teach kids about distances in both outer and inner space.

The film begins with our point of view hovering over a one-meter square enclosing a picnic blanket and two people at the edge of Lake Michigan — then, our perspective increases by powers of ten (using the very latest in satellite technologies of the day), moving upward from the city at a rapid pace until we zoom off the earth, out of the solar system, and to the very edges of the known universe. Then we zoom back down to earth and go inside the nucleus of a carbon molecule in one of the picnicker’s hands.

What I love about Powers of Ten, aside from the way it makes concrete some very abstract ideas about distance, is the truly existential character of the narration. Once we’ve reached the edge of the universe, our point of view hovers in a field of black. “This emptiness is normal,” Morrison intones. It’s as if kids watching the film weren’t just being taught about light years and angstroms, but about how to deal with being finite creatures in a seemingly infinite universe. Plus, the trippy electronic music adds a welcome laser-light-show feeling to the proceedings.

If you haven’t seen the film, or haven’t seen it in a long time, I urge you to watch it again. The godless wonder of Powers of Ten will remind you that education isn’t always antiscience and mind-numbing. Sometimes it truly expands children’s minds — and ours — just by showing us maps of our places in the universe.