How time and place shape who we are

If I were on Jupiter right now, I’d be rolling around on all fours under intense gravity, weighing more than 200 pounds. Pressed against the couch like an anvil, I doubted I’d be able to get to the fridge for a beer. If I were on Mercury, I’d weigh 30 kilos, run marathons, jump over pyramids, hills and the Great Wall of China. (But what Mercurian would build a Great Wall when his enemies could jump over it like fleas?)

If I were on Pluto, I’d weigh 15 pounds and be able to do a thousand one-armed push-ups in its insipid gravity (three light steps would take me to visit a distant friend) or hurl me into space. But on Earth, with a mass of 5.97 billion trillion tons, I am a comfortable 80 kilograms, which suits me just fine; I am neither crushed nor carried away by the wind. It’s like I was made for this place.

If I lived in Kabul, I would be accused of being a dangerous heretic who could not believe or hide his disbelief in Muhammad’s claim that he was our creator’s scribe. But here my atheism is a norm and a stretch.

If I walked the grounds of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion register in quantum physics, undergraduates would nudge each other and whisper as I passed: “There he goes. Stupidest man alive. Collatz can’t quite grasp his conjecture.”

But if I had been stationed in France in the time before Christ, I would have become a genius, perhaps even a god, when I explained the cause of the Black Death, pointed out the planets, proved that the earth was round, amazed them with simple hygiene, and explained my Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. The Gauls would cut off my head or worship me; probably both.

And if I were walking outside today and took a shortcut through the grounds of a nursery school, the children’s eyes would squint at me and see that the Brothers Grimm Methuselah was older and more flabby-skinned than any imaginary mastodon.

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I would be transformed and those old day-trippers would think I was dangerously flexible and skinny when I emerged from that nursery onto the trail and into the mess of walking frames and unsteady trips that was an aged care trip fresh out of a minibus.

If I were born in Myanmar, where my average height is 160 centimeters, I would be a real Gulliver and, barring injury or laziness, I would definitely represent my country in basketball at 187 centimeters. Of course, at the Olympics, we would get run over by everyone because my teammates are short and I’m bulky. But I’d request a selfie next to LeBron James, both of us exuding an air of tentative camaraderie, so I reached for his sternum. The photo on the mantel would later be titled: “LeBron Meets Myanmar Giant.”