We Might Feel Small, But We're Bigger Than We Ever Thought

So for those who have wondered if I've been bunking off for the past five weeks, the answer is a resounding: "technically". In reality, I spend all that time driving around the grand ol' US of A in a car that's too powerful, on roads that are too big, spending too much money on too much fuel and eating too much junk food, all while having far too much fun. I won't bore you with the minute details about it, because you probably won't care (have you ever actually sat through a slideshow of someone's holiday snaps?), but I will say this: America is HUGE! I mean, for someone who lives in the UK, where you can drive from one extreme end of the country to the other extreme end in about 15 hours, and where the weather across the country is generally the same (normally raining), this was totally alien to me. One part could have a beautiful summer's day while feeling bad for the hurricane decimating the other. One part has an average summer temperature of 8C. The other: Alligators. It just keeps on going! It's not surprising that nearly 2 in 3 Americans don't hold a passport; there's so much stuff to see before you get to either border that it's almost a waste of time to go to someone else's country unless you have to. And while I'm at it, two things we sorely need to transplant from there to here: firstly we need those fuel pumps that clip in place, so in the 21st century I don't need to stand there holding the switch like some sort of primitive caveman, and second, we need free refills on fizzy drinks in restaurants. Seriously, they cost about 6p in overhead per drink to the establishment, so it's not that unreasonable to expect a bit of leeway on it!

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Nature: Always Putting Us In Our Place

        Do you know what constantly amazes me, even more than the concept that I can load a map of anywhere in the world on my phone or the idea that I can turn a cog on a lump of metal, and hot clean water comes out? It's the idea that it was just over 60 years between the first heavier-than-air flight, and mankind landing on none other than the Moon! That's a colossally short space of time, considering that it was about 1,800 years between men building London and men thinking "I should really get started on one of them new-fangled sewer systems, what with all the death and all". But sewer systems are easy to build. Landing men on the Moon wasn't even something you could class as "difficult", it was immensely hard, with even less room for error than a man's response to the statement "I'm fine". To give you some idea as to how hard it was, it would be like working out the precise speed, trajectory, timing and conditions to successfully throw a frisbee from one end of a football field to the other, while hitting an exact spot on a moving target, and then someone at the other end throwing it back to another exact spot on a moving target. While strapped to explosive fuel. During a hurricane. At night. And if you make the slightest error at any point in the proceedings, people will die a long, drawn out fiery/vacuum death and the entire frisbee-throwing programme will be scrapped forever. All that, just over 60 years after a rickety airplane flew a distance less than the wingspan of a 747.

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Get the world into perspective. Trust me, it's a big place.

Here's something that makes me go all weird for a few minutes if I think about it: the Earth's crust is only 70km thick at it's largest point, and something like 5-10km thick at the lowest points of the ocean bed. below that is 2,200km of mantle. Have you ever seen lava flow from a volcano? That stuff is magma. This swirls round at stupidly hot temperatures at very high pressure, and moves the earths crust around. Want to know what causes things like earthquakes and grounds your flight to Iceland? That'll be the mantle. below that is the core. This is mostly iron and is more dense than your average Big Brother contestant. it's constant moving causes the magnetic field that helps you find your way. It is unimaginably hot, and the whole shebang goes down a total of 6,500km, which is about the distance from England to Uganda. Wowzers!

Now, look at the ground. All that is going on right under your feet, right now!

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