We live in a vast universe that spans enormous scapes in time and space. But humans have only evolved to understand information in quantities that they can easily relate to — human scaled. We can conceive landscapes mostly in chunks we can easily walk and connected loosely by strands of distances we can drive comfortably. We live in the now, but relate to the future in terms of the past that we don’t remember well. We can make plans just within a very narrow scope of time — days, perhaps week. The future is always elusive and vague. And we are really just able to maintain a web of a few dozen relationships. Time, space, and human interactions are super limited for us. We don’t process and thus truly comprehend information of large or very small scales. It’s not who we are. This is why it is easy for us to fall for logic traps that equate our family organization with country-wide system of laws, for example. And it’s one of the reasons we need lawyers and scientists, people who are trained to think non-colloquially about the world — we are not nimble at figuring out all of the restrictions we placed on ourself to help us cope with living in a world far larger and more complex than we are capable of truly comprehending.

There is an expression: “human scaled” design. In essence, it’s just about presenting information and functionality in terms that make sense to most people, providing only limited scope and salient details. Most of the time, such approach works — we judge others and our own interactions based on “does this make sense to me?” But this reasoning strategy sometimes yields very strange results at times: measuring asteroids in giraffes (for information of how to use this measure effectively, please visit “what if” site), sinkholes in washing machines, poop loads in billiard balls, and personal space in deer body lengths! The truth is that humans are very bad at estimating measures. And we also frequently misremember what we’ve observed. Our emotions are tied to how we perceive the world. If frightened, we see things as bigger, darker, and more threatening than they really were. It’s why humans make such bad eye witnesses.

Human limitations give rise to lots of human mistakes, which in turn, create wonderful situational comedy, full of misunderstandings — a gold mine for writers. It makes for pretty good drama, too. But knowing how susceptible we all are to such errors makes reading such stories more fun. Here’s to reading about human limitations in time, space, and releshionships!