The sky slowly began to darken. The sun at noon was long gone as the sky slowly filled up with gray clouds- but now dark patches of broken clouds flew past the sky outside. I looked west, only to find a totally mellow horizon tumbling with a misty curtain of shower and bolts of lightning. The frontier of the thunderstorm was approaching my apartment at a great speed. The darkness strengthened with almost every second. Distant rumbles of thunder drew closer and closer. I started to run at top speed toward my neighborhood. Small yet solid raindrops came first, scattered and small in quantity, coloring the ground with dots of deeper color. Well, that was the last warning before the major hit- thunderstorms in Shanghai all share that hostile friendliness. The sky was then already a darkish-brown.
The instant I got under the nearest possible roof, the downpour began.
Raindrops knocked down so hard that the metal roof splattered fanatically. Each and every raindrop were faithfully carrying their own mission of smashing up whatever they met- at least, wetting every corner of any object daring to face the sky of wrath. The density of raindrops was so heavy that they formed countless lines of vanity, thus constructing a misty curtain of grey. Lightning bolts were directly visible. They either slashed across the sky above or directly hit into buildings nearby, lighting up the torrential sky like aged magnesium flashlights, with their specific blue tint. Their twisted existence was totally erratic, with a charming quality to their motion; for the thunder, it was the bass from above, shaking and shattering your guts with the power they have practiced so well during the last 4 billion years. Every proton released by the flash traveled and bounced at an unbelievable rate; at the instant the bolt struck across the air, the unsolved ultimate secret of electrons at least displayed their vain existence. With the huge voltage difference between the clouds and the ground, even air could betray its nature and become conductive. The fusion of wind, thunder and shower was fantastic- it was Mother Nature displaying her strength, just by gently clashing two slightly different currents of atmospheric air flow……Any human being would be simply awed by a slightly stronger thunderstorm like this. Extreme thunderstorms and twisters are even more spectacular. Who says that men could overrule nature? This is just a simple and slight demonstration of her uncontrollable powers.
You haven’t seen the undersea volcanos where the future continent was forming;
You haven’t witnessed how the plateaus and snow-topped peaks were formed, almost casually, over millions of years;
You haven’t realized that the slight tipping and scratching of two land plates and a slight shaking of the ocean could mean an earthquake and tsunami beyond any possible control to us;
You haven’t (and couldn’t have) imagined how your life would be if a larger asteroid hit even the opposite side of the planet- see the dinosaurs? Yet, that was so common in the entire universe.
When I was a child I was disturbed by thunderstorms. The force that they displayed were totally stunning. Yet now, I would rather choose to observe or even feel them. Not just the booming of the thunders- what I want to respect is the force of nature. Spectacular performances go on every day. If we think it over:
Somewhere in the universe a tiny belt of dust lay across space, stretching out just a hundred thousand lightyears. On this scale, nothing could possibly be visible- only endless darkness trying to drown you. Zooming in, we see the so called “great wall”, made up of clusters of clusters of superclusters that are made up by clusters of numerous galaxies. :-D Each supercluster could easily consist of millions or billions of galaxies. Our milky way is about 100,000 lightyears in width; to be honest, that’s wimpy, although we can’t ever escape even the spiral arm that we live in; although it may only be made up by billions of stars; although the supermassive black hole in the middle could only light up the night sky here; although any light from the opposite side needs a hundred thousand years to reach us……
We shall try further zooming in until we could finally see our sun. There it is, a yellowish-white dot in the vanity of space, with dim stars and galaxies in the background. Right now the entire solar system is moving FAST. It’s hard to really estimate the exact speed of it. But I promise, the movement for each second could be measured at least in hundreds of miles. Imagine a totally static relative space- if you stay on the spot, next second you would be probably over Russia, or the East China Sea.
Our planet is just a piece of floating rock in the solar system, with a thin layer of gas surrounding its surface; shallow pools of water covered most of its surface; tiny dusts of intelligence built fragile structures upon their piece of lands.
However, they sent their own piece of dust into space, out of the heliosphere;
They covered the rock with themselves, in a vast and complicated social structure,
They locked their eyes on the vast horizon beyond their reach;
They are great dusts.
They have brains that make them fabulous dusts.
You know what?
Their brains contain the entire universe.