Contemplating Massive Excavation Projects

It made a bigger impression than I had intended, on Daniel, when I told him that the center of the earth is extremely hot. I think once I told the boys that if you were to dig from where we lived, all the way through the earth to the other side, then you would emerge from this Super-Big-Dig in China, or somewhere near there. But as a disclaimer, I mentioned that you couldn't actually dig through the earth, among other reasons because it's extremely hot at its core. So Daniel apparently came to believe that if you were to dig a few feet into the ground, it would be very hot. When I realized, last night, that this was how he construed my initial information, I tried to reassure him that one could dig one's entire life and still never get to that hot center of the earth.

So Daniel cross-examined the proposition: "But if you digged when you were a baby, which is impossible, would you do it?"

(December 3, 2011)