Ants and Gods

(Michael Vaughan - senior at Dover-Sherborn High School)

The most empowering and humbling experiences of my life thus far happened simultaneously on our thirteen hour fight from Toronto to Beijing over Siberia. I was absent mindedly looking out of our plane window when the sun rose to me for the second time today and the land we were flying over crept into view through the dissolving canvas of the cloud layer.



Initially, I was more concerned with the sun rise that was splitting the sky into ever lighter distinct shades of blue with tinges of orange in the clouds by the horizon, but then, when wall of snow began to fracture, I became acutely and painfully aware of how pitifully insignificant and immensely powerful we humans really are. All of this because of Canada’s airplanes and a strangely named man’s cat.

One has no sense of scale as he looks at a landscape thirty-five thousand feet below him. The newly visible ground remained, for the most part, hidden to me except for what appeared to be brown dust sprinkled seemingly randomly on the wall snow. The ambiguous shapes of thousands of flat depressions in the snow were, at the same time, frozen puddles and lakes connected to one another by tiny streams of ice and massive rivers looked, at first glance, to be part of an incomprehensibly large tributary system that stretched on for thousands of miles. It strikes me how small I really am at six foot four, two hundred ten pounds. I am nothing compared to this vastness.

Simultaneously, I remembered Schrödinger’s famous Cat. Schrodinger, like me, was clearly more of a dog person. The cat, if the reader is not familiar with the story, is put into a sealed bunker with a bomb that has exactly a fifty percent chance of exploding and killing him after a given amount of time. While the cat is in the bunker with the bomb the unlucky feline could either be dead or alive and until observed is just that. Dead or alive, but neither dead nor alive, until observed. This famous mental experiment gave the power to collapse multiple realities into a single one, to the observer. How thrilling is that? Simply by observing something one forces it to exist. One feels like a god flying over lakes that look like swimming pools, whole mountain ranges that look like nothing more than wrinkles in a carpet, and deep flowing rivers that look like the path a spilled drink took on beach sand and know that because it is your eyes seeing them that they exist, exactly as they are.

I am not even in China yet and this trip is already worth the effort that I put in to making myself a part of it. Just flying over this environment that remains inhospitable to humans, despite all of our so called progress has been as profound experience as proving that it exists and not just some insane construct of a sleep deprived teenager on already the best trip of his life.

Post Script

I am entirely sure that this ramble is full of mistakes and poor phrasing, please excuse it as I am writing it at five AM after an all nighter to avoid jet lag. I highly recommend that the reader do some further reading on Schrödinger’s cat because I know I did not even come close to doing one of the more interesting ideas I have come across.