Take that Bauerlein!

A couple of Canadian millennials launched a Lego minifugre into the reaches of outer space. All for the fun of it.



This single event dispells so many myths that Mark Bauerlein spreads about the millennials. The two students were able to get off Facebook and Twitter long enough to devote four and a half months into this project. Not only did they handsew the parachute needed to return their cargo to earth, but they also constructed a styrofoam box to carry the minifigure, three cameras, a cell phone, and a GPS app.

Their ingenuity is wonderfully refreshing in the face of Bauerlein's insistence that millennials are dumb and anti-inellectuals: the boys bought a weather balloon online for $85. They used helium from a party supply store. They also put two mitten warmers inside the styrofoam box to keep everything warm and functioning properly on the way up. In all they spent $400 - just because they wanted to conduct an experiment, one they were inspired to after watching a video (no doubt on-line via that dastardly invention known as YouTube) of MIT students who sent a balloon to near space.

Bauerlein claims that his book, The Dumbest Generation, in part is designed to have millennials prove him wrong. The problem is that he is so biased that he will never admit to being proven wrong. He will no doubt assert that these two students and their uber-cool science experiment (done, by the way, completely out of school) is an incredibly rare example. He would argue that the run-of-the-mill millennial is not doing activities like this.

And he is probably correct. But we could level the same argument at him. The average baby-boomer is not busy needlessly bashing an entire generation when the bulk of his peers acknowledge that no one generation is smarter or dumber than any other. Just equipped with different skills and expectations.