Some people have a stupendous ability to put things in perspective.
The unique ability to not only focus on an issue or a range of issues but also to zoom in to details and out for perspective, multiple times making sense of the environment.
The below passage just puts in perspective our solar system.
If, then, we represent our earth as a little ball of one inch diameter, the sun would be a big globe nine feet across and 323 yards away, that is about a fifth of a mile, four or five minutes’ walking.
The moon would be a small pea two feet and a half from the world.
Between earth and sun there would be the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, at distances of one hundred and twenty-five and two hundred and fifty yards from the sun.
All round and about these bodies there would be emptiness until you came to Mars, a hundred and seventy-five feet beyond the earth; Jupiter nearly a mile away, a foot in diameter; Saturn, a little smaller, two miles off; Uranus four miles off and Neptune six miles off.
Then nothingness and nothingness except for small particles and drifting scraps of attenuated vapour for thousands of miles. The nearest star to earth on this scale would be 40,000 miles away.
H G Wells, A short History of the World, 1922
p.s: "War of the Worlds" was one of his fiction works.
The author adds a comment further which is remarkable.
"For in all this enormous vacancy of space we know certainly of life only upon the surface of our earth. It does not penetrate much more than three miles down into the 4,000 miles that separate us from the centre of our globe, and it does not reach more than five miles above its surface. Apparently all the limitlessness of space is otherwise empty and dead."
I mention remarkable, for all that insight and perspective he didn't quiet think there is God - a creator. He makes an implicit mention of this fact in this work.
It is pretty surprising that H G Wells didn't think it reasonable that we were all created, which brings me to a jest:
Man has finally been able to gather all wisdom and understanding present in this world. I mean, man has finally been able to figure out 'genesis' and he now knows how to create 'life'.
So being a son of Adam, he calls on God to exude his ability.
Man: God, we have finally figured out how to create.
God: Is that so? Well, please feel free to demonstrate.
Man, absolutely ecstatic that he is going to put God in his place, finally.
Man: Ok, I am ready, give me some mud and I can begin.
God: Make your own mud and you can begin!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment