I was once told that the size of the spaceship NASA sent to the edge of our solar system — and beyond — was determined by the size of old wagon ruts. They told me a whole bunch of reasoning, too, but I can’t remember it now. I also remember hearing that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can start a hurricane. I was given some scientific mumbo-jumbo reasoning for that too, but I can’t remember it either.
But it makes me wonder.
If wagon ruts can affect the dimensions of something that’s hurtling past stars we’ve never seen, if a butterfly can affect the creation of a storm that can destroy homes and lives… then what can I do? What can I affect? And if we work together, does that double or quadruple our effect on the world? I should ask my math teacher that question: when calculating how much you can change the world, do you add or multiply?
Or maybe math doesn’t come into it at all. Maybe it’s the angle of the sun, the tilt of the stars, the force of my own conviction or how much chocolate I ate that day. Maybe, for no reason at all, if you and I work together, our effect will be 7.692 times greater than if we’d been working on our own. Or maybe it will 120,581 times greater, because of love or music or a well-timed snowstorm or a dragon or a unicorn. Or something neither you nor I can imagine.
But I’m getting tired of hypothesizing. I always preferred to work backwards in math class, anyways. So instead, I’ll try to change the world, and calculate how well it worked afterwards. I have faith that my calculator can handle that much, at least, because it’s a very fancy one that was required for precalculus and you can graph a smiley-face on it if you know the right formulas.
I wonder… will I have the same affect as wagon ruts? As a butterfly? More or less? Oh well, enough wondering. I’m going to go find out.
Are you coming? You might increase our chances by 120,581 times, you know.
Leave a Reply