Perspective

If you zoom in on something close enough, or zoom out wide enough, differences disappear.

Have you ever looked closely at the brightly colored pixels in a drop of water on your computer screen? Seen the Sun’s rays refracted through a prism? Walked right up to an impressionist painting only to find that what once were water lilies are now undefined swaths of color?

Earth, seen from even the astronomically negligible distance to Saturn (900 million miles on “The Day Earth Smiled”) looks the same as the North Star to the naked and untrained eye. And our star the Sun, the same as many other stars and galaxies in our Universe.

As for people, well, we need a different kind of lens to smooth out our differences.

It’s not very often in our everyday lives that we can whip out an electron microscope mid-conversation, train it on our conversation partner, and settle our differences by visual confirmation that we’re made up of the same atoms and bacteria. Nor do we often get the chance to stand at the top of the Burj Khalifa and watch humans become patterns almost 3000 feet below.

Perhaps instead, we zoom in past “what’s your favorite flower?” to “how do you feel when you smell this flower?” Or zoom out beyond political views, borders, socioeconomic statuses, to “what role do humans play in our home planet’s ecosystem?” We may soon lose sight of the boundaries between us that once seemed so vital to our identities, and step into a more innate and connected one.