What Happens When the (Explosions!)

Every once in a while someone will start using words like ‘isotope’ and ‘magnetic fields’ and ‘heavy water’ and ‘Deuterium’ in a conversation with me, and I can see that these are real words that mean real things. And then I realize how very, very stupid I am. I can’t understand these things. The more you try to explain them, the more I will cry.

But my husband is very smart. He thinks these are things we should have regular, Saturday night conversations about. This last Saturday he somehow brought up the shifting of magnetic poles and how it could be interesting as part of a sci-fi plot.

Magnetic poles are things I have heard of, and I do recall once hearing about how every once in great while the polarity of the Earth flips. However, I was never told what exactly that means, and what it would actually do to the Earth. So I ‘interneted’ (that’s what people say, right?) the phrase “what happens when. . .” which was as far as I got before the following choices were offered me:

Now, I understand asking questions like “what happens when you die,” because if you’re going to get a useful answer to that question somewhere, it’s definitely from people on the web. They only use the best and most accurate sources. Likewise with “What happens when a girl gets turned on?” and “What happens when you pop your cherry?” because neither of those phrases give enlightening descriptions of the experiences they’re referring to. I know how many years I spent baffled by that particular cherry question before I realized how unrelated it is to actuality.

After pondering all this, I had to stop and ask myself how I contribute to the world of internet searches. I considered what I most often do searches for. It breaks down something like this: 60% questions about historical events/people, 40% “how to say [a word] in Russian/French/Spanish/ASL.

I wonder why I don’t fit in. Why aren’t more people wondering about the settling of the American west or why the Russians use the word ‘soul’ so much?

Remembering that I was actually trying to find out “what happens when the poles shift?” I jumped back into research mode. I got as far as typing “what happens when the” when I found all these search options:

What happens when the MUCUS PLUG COMES OUT?!!?! How did we go from getting turned on to losing the mucus plug?! And if you got that far into your pregnancy before finding out what happens in the final stages of it, you are WOEFULLY unprepared for what’s about to happen!

At this point my husband and I started laughing so hard and talking about mucus plugs and how the word ‘plug’ is gross enough as it is, why did they have to add ‘mucus’ to it? They could have thought of a nicer way to refer to it. Something less descriptive (maybe having to do with cherries, which are so pleasant.) We quite forgot to continue with our search and to this day I don’t have an inkling as to “what happens when the poles shift,” and therefore will never be able to write a sci-fi story using the shifting of the poles as a plot device.

Fortunately, I do not think this will be a great loss to the world, as I had no plans to write a sci-fi book in the first place. Even if I had such plans, the book would no doubt have been poorly researched and of dubious quality.

Actually, now that I think about it, one never knows until one tries, and so this is the first draft of the opening paragraphs of my science-fiction novel entitled “Real Science Explains Impossible Occurances”:

“Boom! Blast! Explosions! A just-primitive-enough underground society experiences the effects of either warfare or a catastrophic natural disaster, possibly caused by aliens. (However, if there are aliens in this story they will definitely have to be the bug-type aliens because I am very afraid of the small gray sort and I can’t write a whole book about them.) The protagonist, a young person who doesn’t always fit in very well with society, has information no one else has. It is up to him—or possibly her—to do something heroic over the course of three hundred pages. The protagonist wears clothing strange to the presumed readers of this account, although his/her attire generally falls in line with that the other people in the underground civilization wear.

Goodness, me! Someone needs to be saved! It is either someone unable to fend for him/herself, or else someone who is important to furthering the plot of this story about explosions and maybe aliens, and lots of important scientific explanations.”

Now, wouldn’t you like to read a story like that? Say the word and I will think of some more concrete details to put in. It would be great if you could think of some, though.