Third cultural event

I was assigned to write once again about a cultural event, and initially I was going to write it about a math competition, but I had to drop the team in which I was going to the competition because I had things to do on the day of the competition, so I decided to write about my experience in a museum. Now I know that I already wrote about a museum in the first entry about the cultural event, but this entry is different because in order to get to this museum I had to get off of the school bus in Hidalgo on Friday February 27th, then I had to walk 1.4 miles (around 30 minutes walking ) to the southwest, and cross a river in order to get to foreign lands. Yes, the museum is in the far away lands of Mexico. I was sure that the city of Reynosa is more than drug dealers, soldiers in the streets carrying their loaded guns on the top of trucks, and cheap healthcare.

So after crossing the border, I went to the house of my parents to spend the weekend in order to go to the museum on Saturday. Saturday came, and my dad and me went  to the museum which is almost outside the city. Like always happens when I go to a cultural event, it was cloudy, rainy and during a cold front.

The name of the museum that I went was Casa de la tierra (which means Earth’s house). It was completed last January, and is funded by the state government. The mission of Casa de la Tierra is to educate the people about global warming, climate change, and pollution. I entered to the building and a girl (not a lady, she was like 20) greeted us and informed us that the next tour was going to start at midday, but we could interact with two computers that were in there. The museum was smaller than the one in mcallen, and although I already knew most of the information on it, it still amazed me the information that I didn’t knew. The computers that we went sent to interact with were two spheric screens in which the earth was projected, and by a touch screen panel, you could project the image that you wanted to see. For example, you could see the Earth at night, forest fires around the globe, changes of Ice around the world, frequency of lightings, etc. There was also an option in which you could project Mars, the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons), the sun, solar radiation as seen by the satellite SOHO, and the planets compared with the solar surface. At twelve, the guide tooks us for a tour around the museum, which consisted in an spiral stars what went up. As we walked throughout the stars, at the wall in my right there was a time line about the creation of the universe which started with a thought that said in Spanish: “In the stelar ovens were created most of the atoms of the chemical elements that gave origin to all the matter we know, including the living beings. The calcium of our bones, the iron of our blood, the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen of our cells of our body, they are product of the nuclear reactions of the stars. Like the famous astronomer Carl Sagan said ‘We are all Stardust’”.

After this thought, our journey thru the history of the universe started with the Big Bang, an explosion that lasted around three minutes and created all the elements, and the different forces, such the gravity force, and the nuclear force. Moreover, We learned about the years light unit (the unit to measure distances in the universe that mean the time that light would take to go over a distance. 1 year light means that light takes a year to go over a distance). We also learned about the Relativity theory, and the theories of what is going to happen with the universe. The first one is The Big Crush, which says that the universe will get to its greatest expansion, and then it is going to shrink to a small point; then there is The Big Rip, that says that the universe will continue to expand and all the particles will eventually disintegrate as a result of the expansion,and finally, the theory that says that nothing will happen, but the universe will continue to expand forever. After this timeline, it was followed a timeline of the earth, that started with the earth as a big red ball at its very beginnings, then the species were created in a flood starting by the cyanobacteria, those bacterias were becoming more complex, until they became dinosaurs, who then were killed by an asteroid, and then mammals survived, then some monkey appeared in earth and evolved until they became humans, who then founded cities that started to pollute the world. After we finished the timeline, the college girl guide took us to a dome in the very top of the building which was some sort of cinema, but this cinema had the screen shaped in a sphere, actually it was the same thing as the one that I saw in the museum in Mcallen. She went away and another guide came in to put us projection in the globe, and to talk as the images appeared. I remember that he asked “How many penguins can a polar bear eat?” my father said two, but I knew to what the guide was going to. So I said “Well, if you give them to the bear it sure is two, but a polar bear cannot eat any penguins since they both live in the opposite poles of the earth” and then my dad said “Well, but it might happen in a congressman’s zoo” making reference to a note on the news on friday that said that a private zoo was confiscated from a Mexican congressman in the Federal government, so we all laugh from this satire. Then the guide put us a video about what would the earth say to us if she had a voice, how we (humans) are destroying her. After this video finished, the tour did. I went home with several mementos to put in here.

Now, reflecting about what happened in the museum, I wonder what if that museum was built in the US. I can imagine conservatives going not to learn, but t̶o̶ ̶b̶u̶r̶n̶ ̶i̶t̶ to protest. I really like that museum, because among all the science museums that I have visited, I have never been in one that explained so well the global warming issue. Projects like this make the people to become educated about their surroundings, and create conscience. Also it touches the evolution and the continental drift theory, which are the best proved explanations on how the world works, and although in Mexico there are not as much people that believe in Creationism (the only mexican creationists that I can think of are SOME priests, church officers, catholic schools, and politicians from the PAN (Mexican f̶a̶s̶c̶i̶s̶t̶ conservative political party (the Mexican GOP, although the Mexican GOP are the PRI and PAN together))). It still opens the minds of those who are not educated in the sciences. And like one of the best Popes that the Church has had, Pope Francis, I also support the Evolution because it doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but it proves that God exists because God is not a wizard who made everything like if it was witchcraft, but took its time making everything better (the Pope said something that looked like this).

 The Earth. Version 2.0.