Copyright brisbanetimes
If I were on Jupiter right now, in its fierce gravity, I would be turtling around on all fours weighing more than 200 kilograms. Pressed into the sofa like an anvil, I doubt I could get to the fridge for a beer. If I were on Mercury, I would be 30 kilograms, running marathons, leaping over pyramids, hillocks and Great Walls. (But what Mercurian would build a Great Wall when his enemies could leap it like fleas?) If I were on Pluto, I would weigh 5 kilograms and could do a thousand one-armed push-ups in its insipid gravity – three light steps would take me to visit a distant friend – or launch me into space. But on Earth, with its mass being a happy 5.97 billion trillion tonnes, I am a comfortable 80 kilograms, which suits me fine – I am neither crushed nor windborne. It’s almost as if I were built for the place. If I lived in Kabul, I would be condemned as a dangerous heretic, unable to believe, or hide my disbelief, in Mohammed’s claim to be an amanuensis for our creator. But here my atheism is a norm and a yawn. If I walked the grounds of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion enrolment in quantum physics, the undergraduates would nudge each other and whisper as I passed by: “There he goes. The dumbest man alive. Completely unable to grasp the Collatz conjecture.”
