Here’s a little something different.

I usually don’t do these, but saw this one and thought it’d be fun.  Wordpress’s daily prompt is here: Change One Law of Nature.  I saw that and I went into high gear, because boy howdy, I love a good thought experiment.

My first thought was: gravity.  Lower the force of gravity by a factor of, oh, I dunno, maybe five or six.  Give us moon gravity, basically, and turn the whole earth into a giant bouncy house.  Whee, fun!  But you change the law for earth, you change it for the rest of the universe.  The sun loses its gravity, too.  Earth goes spiraling, screaming, into the void of deep space and humanity is wiped out in a matter of years if not days.  Whoops.

Then, okay, how about friction?  (Is friction a natural law?  On a molecular level I know it’s not, but I’m pretending it is.)  Friction sucks.  It ruins the gas mileage on my new minivan, it slows me down when I’m running, it’s a major party pooper.  Scale it down, or get rid of it.  Whoops, now you can’t use the brakes in your car.  Nor can you accelerate for that matter, in a car or otherwise.  The only method of propulsion that’s left is to spring away from things at high angles of incidence, and soon everything in creation is sailing around with no chance of stopping, just careening off other maddeningly unidirectional objects — some of which are achieving breakneck speeds because they got pushed by things like jumbo jets for example — until you achieve an escape vector and, again, go spiraling off into the void of deep space.  So yeah, maybe keep friction.

What’s left?  One of my favorite words-of-the-day, Entropy, or the tendency of energy to leave a system (yeah, I know, that’s wickedly oversimplified, but I’m not a rocket scientist; I took creative writing in college, okay?)  Yeah, that one’s a bummer.  It’s why we die, it’s why stars burn out, it’s why your pizza left on the countertop gets cold and then your dog eats it.  The cold.  Not the dog.  The dog behaves according to her own laws, most of which involve acting like a fool all the dharma time.  So get rid of entropy.  But then we live forever, until we get ourselves killed.  There is no “natural causes”.  (Don’t tell me that “is” should be “are” there.  It shouldn’t.)  So we begin to overpopulate.  And because the energy doesn’t dissipate, the sun doesn’t cool.  In fact, it never cools.  In fact, it never cooled, nor did the Earth, so life on our planet would never have existed in the first place.

It’s all well and good to think of these things in the pocket of our own experience, but the Laws of Nature are laws for a goldfinger good reason.  If nature didn’t follow them, then the Nature we know would not exist, it would be something else entirely.

Don’t Fargo with Nature.  Don’t do drugs.  Stay in school.