I have a personal opinion about Hell, if Hell exists, and it’s a floor stretching out for eternity. Covered in Lego. Yeah. That’s my definite version of Hell.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Lego. Those little blocks make for hours of a frustrating good time and these days come in some wild builds. The Space Shuttle build is my kidlet’s favorite.
And that brings me to the point of this whole little ramble: kidlets and Lego.
Every parent’s worst child-related fears come with some version of them swallowing a foreign object. How long until it passes? Will it do damage on the way through? Will it come out at all?
A handful of enterprising Australian doctors finally decided they wanted to answer this question. And Lego minifig heads went down the hatch.
The fun part about this whole situation is the absurd lengths some scientists will go to in the name of research. Looking at the whole thing with a jaundiced eye, humans really do seem like a wild and crazy bunch of weirdos who will do anything that comes to mind, just to see what happens. Space Orcs, as the idea goes. It’s a mentality to keep in mind while working with the aliens in your work, the strange and outrageous ideas humans come up with, and how we look in relation to the seemingly calm, rational aliens we write (or maybe meet for real, one day).
I’m looking forward to just how Doc Brown we can get as a species, and the epic, though for now fictional, eyerolls we can garner in our scientific pursuit.
-T.A. Creech
Science in the pursuit of Fiction.