Dragonfly World

What the dragonfly sees is not what I see. He sees three-dimensionally, while I see the width and depth of the world in a way that only allows me to imagination its depth and distance. He’s looking through 30,000 facets at a world I see with 2.

His eyes function to immerse him within a radius of about 10 feet. The insect ganglia do not allow him to interpret the data of light he is receiving; then again, he doesn’t need to! His brain is sufficient for moving his body toward the object of desire revealed by that light show he is flying inside of. It is not a decision he makes to fly toward a food source, it is an inevitability of the food-shaped light entering his brain!

No matter where I am standing, I can see to the horizon. The higher I am standing, the farther away that horizon will be. But I can’t see beyond 25 or 30 feet very well, even with my 20/20 vision. Small things drop out of sight quickly and even large things, farther away, lose their specificity. The dragonfly and I both share a very limited range of seeing, adequate for our particular needs, but absolutely useless to the other.

When I see a dragonfly, I might say “He is flying over the water.” But that is true only from my point of view. His world is not my world! His is a 20 foot diametrical ball of color and form which I cannot even begin to imagine. The content of his vision and the meaning of what he sees are utterly alien to me, as mine would be to him.

Whose world is it? We humans can call it ours all day, but dragonflies have been functioning on this planet for 100 million years before the dinosaurs, and more of the world has been reflected through dragonfly eyes than ours, many times over. Nothing they have done within their environment has damaged in any way the existence of the environment itself or any life forms within it, except those they’ve eaten. 

It’s a good thing (I guess) that there are no proprietary laws in operation, other than in our human courtrooms.

Or, maybe there are?