We had some fabulously interesting dinner table conversation today. Perhaps I'm easily impressed since so much of our mealtime conversation revolves around Harry Potter and Legos and me trying to squelch conversations that have anything to do with bodily noises. So today's topics were a real treat!
At lunch the boys and I debated what would happen if a person were able to be in a bubble in the center of the earth. Would he hover in mid-bubble, since the gravity-creating mass would be distributed evenly all around him? Would he explode as the gravity-creating mass all around him pulled him in every direction at once? Would he implode because of the intense air pressure at the center of the earth (you know, if there were a bubble of air there, theoretically speaking)? The only solid answer I came away with was that something would definitely happen to him -- not her -- since only a boy would be found in some place as dangerous and exciting as the center of the earth.
And then at dinner we dreamed of having an enormous, interactive time-lapse globe that would let us watch the entire history of the earth condensed down to ten minutes. Or one hour. Or an entire day. The shifting of mountains, dividing of continents, carving of canyons, spread of civilization and slide of glaciers all in fast-forward. How cool would that be? And what if you could zoom in on smaller sections of the earth and tell it to play just the years within a certain timeframe -- we could watch the flood, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the growth of Wizard Island, the crumbling of Pangea, the building of the pyramids or the Great Wall of China or the tower of Babel or the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. We could see the chorus of angels that sang at Jesus' birth.
"Do you think we'll be able to see all that when we get to heaven?" one of the boys asked.
It sure would be cool, wouldn't it?
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