Dynamic Earth

I spent the last couple of days in Edinburgh - my second favourite city (beaten out by Stockholm). I lived in Edinburgh for around 18 months around 2016 and absolutely loved it. In particular, we lived in Moray Place (number 42) and I worked for Skyscanner at Quartermile and got to walk through Edinburgh each and every day to a cool office doing a cool job with cool people.

Visiting Edinburgh

We stayed at a Hostel in a family room, and were the ‘token’ family. Often when we travel we’re very much the demographic of the place we’re staying, but staying at a hostel we’re really not. Cue an array of baffled but generally happy glances from travellers as the family of five descends to the bar for dinner.

The national museum was nice enough, and I was reminded of a work Christmas do there where I accidentally spat a glass of red wine onto a very fancy white dress, then got horrendously drunk before an early morning flight to Bordeaux. Oh to be young.

Dynamic Earth

My favourite part (apart from the kids eating waffles and ice-cream at 7:30am for breakfast, or the kids climbing into the baby’s travel cot, or the kids celebrating getting ice in the apple juice, or the badgering us for hours because the were so excited about having bunk beds, or the kids…) was Dynamic Earth.

Dynamic Earth is a museum/experience near Holyrood in Edinburgh, focussing on elements of astronomy (the big bang, and formation of the earth), geology (tectonic plates, mountains, oceans) and biology (evolution of life, ecosystems).

It’s an interactive experience that features a bunch of films, interesting sets, hands-on exhibits and a planetarium that lets you see ‘the universe’ on the (very) big screen.

Inspiration

I hadn’t expected to be inspired by the visit (it was for the children - not me!) but hearing how much we know about the furthest reaches of space, and the seconds and years after the big bang were mad. I’d ‘known’ it all before (I do have a physics degree) but I guess I’d forgotten, or not really considered it before. Generation after generation of curious people have worked very hard in specific areas in order to discover these things. How cool is it that we know what the universe was like 7 billion years ago? That we know when and how dinosaurs came to be, and how they disappeared. That we know about tectonic plates, and how quickly they move and over how many years they formed certain mountains.

While watching the videos I thought about some of the questions and how interesting they were. Knowing what I know about academia, I can only applaud the scientists who must have worked tirelessly in order to discover the answers to those questions.

Timescales

Another humbling realisation was the nature of the timescales involved in the earth. 4 million years from the first bipedal hominids to the current day feels like an unfathomably large period of time. 200,000 years of human beings is basically a rounding error on that. 10,000 years of recorded history, or circa 2,000 years of ‘modern’ history. Even 500 years of modern political history…all seem like long periods of time, but all pale into utter insignificance compared to ‘blips’ like the dinosaurs, or the time taken to go from aquatic life to land-based life.

Continents drift at the speed that human fingernails do…and so watching a map of the continents move and shift over time feels preposterous, until you realise over just how long those time-lapses happen.

I view our world as basically ‘finished’ - the continents are where they are, the planetary elemental composition is fixed, and ice-ages are tales from bygone eras. Over the timescale of my lifetime, I’m right. But my lifespan is so short, and actually, I just see a brief snippet of an ever-changing world.

Conclusion

People are awesome, really. Evolution is incredible when you think about it, and to represent the (current) apex of that is mad. We saw a life-size model of a sabre-tooth tiger and decided we wouldn’t want to meet that on a dark night. But it’s extinct. Hunted to extinction by humans.

We’ve uncovered so much, and understand so much about our universe - through maths, physics, chemistry, biology, geology and all the rest. Our social and political systems let us spend time thinking and experimenting and that thinking and experimenting lead to a richer and stronger species that can invest more time and effort in science.

I think I’ll read some more sci-fi. I read the Three Body Problem and actually really enjoyed how it treated really long time-gaps. 2000 years goes by in a flash, and that’s something I’d not experienced much in fiction before.

I left Dynamic Earth with a brief spark of appreciation for generations of scientists, as well as some happy and exhausted children. All-in-all, a trip well worth it.