Science Lecture Captured #1

My son is 8 years old and happens to be autistic. He is gaining more and more interest and knowledge about science. He’s always been fascinated by the weather, but in the last several months plate tectonics has captured his attention. Plus, he is trying to figure out what God does and the view of the Bible. We try to help him figure out all the pieces and theories vs. fact vs. not knowing.

 It is all overflowing with these long rambling lectures as he calls them that he has to “get out”. We interrupted him the other night when he was in the midst of one and tried to put him to bed. He fought us tooth and nail scratching and screaming upset to the maximum until we all got calmer after a while and I figured out it was because we’d interrupted him on his lecture walk. He wanders through the yard outside usually, lecturing to me, the bushes, and the air, but it is a driven moment that he has to do. Plus he has to sleep out on our balcony even though the temperature have been dropping into the low fifties at night (quite cold for summer).

This morning, he lectured me and engaged me some. He spoke loudly, not the whispered lectures of the evening, oh no, this was a proclamation about the morning sun. I finally grabbed a piece of paper getting some of it down verbatim. Some of it I remembered. Here it is in entirety as best I could put it back together. I’m so sorry I missed part of it because he had me laughing at his clever turn of phrase too.

"If I was born was born where the space was born....If I were born when the universe started, we must travel back in time. I'd be born in space in a space suit so I could breathe. I'd come down into the atmosphere onto the planet Earth. As we travel back in time, we'll watch what happens when I'm space born.

First, I’d descend into the ocean. No land. Hurricanes blow up and spit me out. Oh, it is rough. Lots of rain pelting my body. It is somewhat confusing. I go up into the air where there is oxygen and hydrogen and the sun warms me some.

 I plunge into the water. Splash! Thousands of feet below the waves it would be dark. There are underwater chimneys spewing hot liquid. These chimneys would create my first life. Single cell organisms. I think we call it single cell bacteria.

Millions of years and then the stromatolites turn sunlight into food and they make the atmosphere not so toxic. My location is on my island, but then the next two billion years the oxygen level will begin to rise and I’ll be so old. But I sleep every night until each dawn. But I can be reminded I can only sleep outside on the ground. Whatever my body feels like. No blankets.

Five million years ago, I still don’t see more complex life. No plants, dinosaurs, and I can’t see any humans. My Earth looks like a beautiful blue ball and there are volcanic activity in my location. It looks like I push and pull the plates around the globe carrying the islands around the globe.

I will still be in my location and in two billion years there will be a super continent: Rodinia. I see in my location is a desert. My planet has been slow. Eighteen hours, but then my planet looks more like Mars than Earth because of the desert in my location.

750 million years ago in my location, state of Washington, something is happening. A great big super continent is splitting into two continents. A new super continent Pennotia. In just a few thousand years the temperature will plummet in my location thousands of degrees. The cold comes. My body freezes and my body will shake. Thousands of ice sheets will meet and form plates and then meet at the equator.  I will look at the sun to see what the ice is doing. Not even the sun can rescue the planet now.

Millions of years the volcanos start emptying. They erupt in my location too. It creates thick shoots and weak spots and oxygen levels rise. Then it will create more carbon dioxide and push up the temperature in my location. About 600 million years ago the temperature will be warmer acting like a summer’s day.

What about something along the oceans? A slug takes up residence it’s called Olaxia (I think he’s trying to say “atlantics”---I looked it up---a kind of ancient sea slug). There are planets. There are worm sponges and lobsters. Mesonychoteuthis, (I had to write this out phonetically and then look it up to figure out what he was talking about. An ancient type of real Kraken type creature just discovered recently that roamed the seas and was quite aggressive), Mesonychoteuthis is 20 feet long, razor sharp eyes and grasping limbs. And it’s a monster. All it has to do with its razor sharp teeth is take its pick. Rodinia and Pennotia are starting to break apart. The end for now. That’s all.