BIG SCIENCE DAY!!
What a big day for Kitty & Martin, the scientists. It begins in Dynamic Earth, where we were transported back in time, you, me, a dad and his five year old on a day out, and a spotty tour guide, back 4.54 billion years, back to the very birth of our world. It is born out of some cosmic debris, waste which happened to be floating around the expanse of the universe, and it is born with hellish temperature, violent combustions, and aggressive volcanic activity. Protoplanets crash into this firey earth to form our moon (the very same one we would one day gaze at outside the National Gallery). These were the birth pangs of our world.
The crust around our Earth is nothing other than the scarring of its wounds, its first continents. And above, the sky, a weak one, which consisted of nothing but some hydrogen and helium reaching us from nebulae. It wasn't until the gases released from the collision which birthed our moon, as well as those from the volcanic eruptions, that a stronger atmosphere began to emerge, one which, with the production of oxygen by ancient bacteria, became the sky we saw all around us that day.
The Earth grew cold, and clouds began to form, ready to rain, rain, rain all day and night. And the same rain that keeps us inside during the freezing winters, watching old films and eating popcorn, is the rain which formed the oceans of the earth.
And then, some cosmological accident, perhaps when the cosmos was distracted, life emerged. Some amino acids, or perhaps an extraterrestrial organic molecules, began to self-replicate, to metabolise, and, what still appears to me as a miracle, to detach themselves from their surroundings, to become something other its environment, by producing cell membranes, allowing some food to enter, and waste products to leave, and exclude unnecesary substances. And, finally, us, seeing it all, the cosmic accidents which lead to our date at Dynamic Earth.
