omg! science!

Well, readers (all three of you?), today Becky and I learned some very important things. Some important things about SCIENCE. My father is always telling me that I need to learn more about science, in order to be able to confront our society's new ethical and political challenges (I'm not sure why he wasn't satisfied with my Archeoastronomy class - totally a real thing - in school). Well, Dad, I've followed your advice, that is, if by learning more about science you meant going to a science themed theme park. Because that's what we did. It's called Science City, and it was an easy taxi ride away, full of lovely families spending a day together, learning. Also us.

Once we took the rope-car ride into the park (worth every paisa of the 20 rupees), we were confronted with a wide variety of options: Evolution! Maritime! Space! Birds! Butterflys! Also a bicycle-propelled monorail. This consisted of a monorail that runs in a circle, that you sit in little open cars and pedal around the track. We did great! Much faster than those small children behind us....I'm not entirely sure what this has to do with science! but I think we should be thinking about this as transportation options. If everyone on a train was pedaling, think how fast we could go!

We also went through an animatronic exhibit on evolution (ps. I love animatronics SO MUCH). Now, I think that this was just supposed to show, on a vague timeline, the evolution of different animals. However, the takeaway that I got was: WE WERE EVOLVED FROM DINOSAURS. No, really. It went from a lot of awesome animatronic dinosaurs, to early mammals, to cave people! Its possible there was some explanation that we just missed, either because we couldn't hear it, or because, you know, our collective Hindi and Bangla vocabulary probably doesn't extend to science. Becky, we should work on this.

The highlight, however, no question, was the planetarium show. Now, you folks may not know this about me, but I love planetariums, and this was in fact the second planetarium show I have seen in Calcutta, in as many years. This was much your normal planetarium show - we heard about some constellations (red arrow included), different kinds of stars, the big bang, and black holes. However, at the end, we also learned that someday, I think about the same time that the sun will expand to eat up Earth, humans will go through a black hole to another planet, where we will be greeted by our alien descendents (I may have misheard this one) to live the rest of our days. There were even pictures of this new planet. It had a lot of water, and some plants that looked sort of like cactuses. This, friends, is what awaits us some billions of years in the future.

Pictures (of science) perhaps to come.