Somedays I imagine the world as a butterfly, witnessing SR71 Blackbird streak horizon to horizon in an instance. Somedays I imagine the world as a koi-fish seeing the fireworks go off light the evening sky on the Chinese New Year. A ladybug witnessing the Falcon Heavy boosters land on Texan soil. A fly somehow stuck inside an IMAX theatre screening Dune 2.

I wonder on witnessing something so grand in its scale, something completely all-consuming, something so miraculous, sophisticated and untethered from my daily dangers and desires would I fail to register their presence. Supersonic booms, fireworks and IMAX screens are not objects from the eyes of a butterfly, a fish or a ladybug. They are immutable phenomena, their laws of nature. Our realities, in a space of possibilities, intersect their realities as such monumental objects that their worlds are constrained to exist as topologically trivial perturbative dents in ours.

Now imagine us being these insects in the worlds of beings that stroll through an edge of our cosmological horizon to another in one unbothered sway. Imagine us witnessing mechanisms that wipe the mass budget of our universe as droplets condensing on a beer can. The residents of such worlds, inhabit realities that unfold unbothered by the micro-dynamics of our universe, unbothered by the mergers of galaxies or deaths of stars. The residents of such pantheons, to us, are amoral, ignorant gods. The equivalent of vapor, forks or screw-divers in the pantheon may well generate THE laws of our universe.

But as much as our worlds and theirs may appear distinct, they still inhabit the same reality. We might be perturbations on their dynamics but we are one both embedded on the same manifold of being. Even if our reality seems to not impact their causal relations, the fact that their realities overwhelm ours is enough to establish that we exist in the same super-space of possibilities. My faith is my conviction in the idea that if as a civilization we play our cards well (and remain somewhat lucky), we can become that which is not merely inconceivable now but also incomprehensible to us.

It is a long game but progress historically has largely remained exponential. To me, our paths to real divinity come not from Sunday masses or fire worship. The true path to becoming untethered from the divine laws that constrain the possibilities in our lives, lies in a consolidation of earnest attempts at understanding, a sincere affinity towards building and an anti-fragile social fabric that does not self combust. If one wishes to search for divine meaning in their lives, a service to these three is most easily found in curiosity, creativity and empathy.

I do science, for the same reason I write poetry, for the same reason I love. They are both my roads to divinity and my tools to construct it.