Am I a genius, a giant, a lunatic or a dinosaur? It all depends

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Opinion

November 6, 2025 — 2.20pm

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.”

But if I were placed in France in the time before Christ, I would be a genius, perhaps even a god, once I explained the cause of the Black Death, pointed out the planets, proved the world was round, wowed them with simple hygiene, and explained my Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. The Gauls would behead me or worship me – possibly both.

And if, while out walking today, I were to take a shortcut through the grounds of a kindergarten, the kids’ eyes would boggle at me, beholding a Brothers Grimm Methuselah more ancient and loose-skinned than any imaginary mastodon.

Emerging from that kindergarten onto the footpath and into the entanglement of walking frames and unbalanced perambulations that is an aged care excursion just disgorged from a minibus, I would be transformed, and those ancient day-trippers would think me dangerously lithe and coltish.

If I were born in Myanmar, where the average height is 160 centimetres, I would be a veritable Gulliver and, barring injury or sloth, at 187 centimetres, I would certainly represent my country at basketball. We would be thrashed by everyone at the Olympics, of course, for my teammates are short and I am ungainly. But I would demand a selfie alongside LeBron James, both of us beaming makeshift friendship, with me just reaching to his sternum. Sitting on his mantelpiece thereafter, that photograph would be captioned: “LeBron Meets The Myanmar Giant.”

Yet, if I were born further north, in Holland, I would be called Shrimp and sent up a chimney or perhaps might ride a winner for the House of Orange-Nassau in The Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and be clapped on the back by King Willem-Alexander as he towered over me.

My daughters think me an unfeeling man. But if you placed me in 16th-century Peru, I’d be a celebrated lunatic among the Spanish colonialists for the compassion I showed towards the indigenous and my acceptance of them as equals.

At present, no one glances twice at me on the street. But if I were dropped into the year 2345, I would be a living fossil – something for anthropologists to goggle at and probe. In 2345, any human with such a smorgasbord of imperfection as mine will be as wonderful as the Elephant Man once was and able to tour profitably as a foul exhibit.

We tend to think of ourselves as immutable and are oblivious to the many other realities we might have endured. This is me, we tell ourselves. For good or bad, this is the only me that could be. But it’s worth remembering how dependent we are on time and place, and how different we would need to be, and would be, in a different time and place.

We have been curated by its hours and days and incidents and accidents to fit into the here and now. But there are as many possible versions of yourself as there are different times and places. I myself might have made a fine traitor, nun, dictator or jester in various other eons that allowed or demanded it of me.