When I was a kid

When I was a kid we used to spend a fair amount of time engineering in our backyard. We built cities, trenches and lakes. We got to flood these things and had a pretty good time but we never attained our greatest goal, digging a hole to China.

We wanted to find out if the people on the other side of the world walked on their hands or walked upside down. We had only the smallest grasp of physics, clearly, but we were pretty young and determined.

We built a replica of the Nile and Lake Victoria, which we knew all about from watching a film with our mom. Then we played Dr. Livingston I presume.

The question is did we fail to dig to China because we were lazy or because we were afraid of the molten core of the earth?

Good old science.