Essay Series
Ramblings on a Word — Imagination
Don’t be an ant on a basketball
If we had imagination, we would understand that we live on the surface of a giant sphere and not on top of a flat board. The reason Earth appears flat to our vision is because, we are a tiny speck on this planet, which makes us disproportionately small to be able to see the entire size of the giant ball.
Instead of arguing with the scientists, we would be able to verify this fact for ourselves personally, if we were giants towering over the planet, with our head reaching past the atmosphere to be able to see the globe in its entirety. Since we are not, we should probably talk to the tiny ant on top of a basketball, about the shape of the object it stands on, and it would say that the basketball it crawls on, is as flat as a pancake. And of course, we would know that the ant is wrong, because we can see the ball, just the way the astronauts can see our planet from space.
If we had imagination we would be able to understand that the blue sphere on top of which we live, spins in a slightly tilted fashion, as it plays a colossal peek-a-boo with the sun on a daily basis, dividing its rotation into day and night.
If we had imagination, we would understand that the surface of the giant ball we call home, is full of dents and bumps, covered by large bodies of water. That which is not submerged, emerges, as dry land with craters and plateaus, mountains and valleys. We are all tethered to mother Earth by the force of gravity, which is why none of the water spills out, nor do we fall off the Earth’s surface.
So, what would happen if a shelf of ice — roughly the size of the state of Delaware — splits from the Antarctic and melts into oceans and seas, compounding to the existing mass of water? Water cannot spill out and fall off the earth because of gravity, so it would rise, submerging more and more land, making life uninhabitable for the land creatures.
Unlike the ant living on top of the basketball, we know that appearances can be deceiving. Hence, the need to examine the truth.
Maybe be it is time to pay attention to the climate scientists, despite the fact that we may be brimming with intellectual brilliance, simply because we have the ability to read and believe anything on the internet that conforms to our unexamined feelings and beliefs.
Unlike the internet experts and hired propaganda scientists, the actual scientists, whose only goal is to ascertain the truth, have been accumulating and studying data on weather patterns for a long time, because they understand that having a balanced atmosphere is crucial to the sustenance of life on earth.
Related News: Reuters article on the breaking of the ice shelf from the Antarctic
Note: This article is part of an essay series, “Ramblings on a Word”.
Originally published at http://lmexpressions.com on June 5, 2017.
