I often wonder what it would be like for humans to see something from two places at once. For instance, imagine where and when you have seen a sunset you really enjoyed. For me, these sunset thoughts bring my memory to Highway 280 on the way back from golf practice or over Underhill Field from my freshman year dorm in Putnam Hall. However, I often wondered what it would be like to watch it from every point of view at once.

A good theoretical reference here is a topographical function in math. Or, even more simply, imagine taking a picnic cloth and spreading it taut with four clothespins at the corners. Next, imagine randomly putting your fingers under it and creating visual undulations that you can see from above. Notice how in this exercise, you can still see the whole tarp and see every single peak and valley on the tarp.

In reality, our view of sunsets is quite small. We think we see the whole sky, but we only see the sunset from our closed, single-sided view. In reality, seeing the whole sky in a sunset would mean that we see the sunset the way you’d see that picnic tarp from above. So that begs the question, how does the sky see the sunset?

I think the sky’s view of sunset would be very interesting. After all, the sky sees what every human sees but reconstructed with every single angle in superposition. I wonder if from the sky’s point of view, all the colors merge into one or if they remain separated. If I had to guess, I would venture that with all of the different views of sunsets on Earth, the sky would just see an amalgamation of the prettiest of the colors that we as humans see – pinks, oranges, and red sunsets all together.

I also imagine a kind of mathematical function that ascribes a magnitude to each sunset in the sky. For instance, imagine a regular cone with height 10 in the z-plane (vertically). Now, imagine that cone stretched a bit longer and a bit taller – it might have height 20 in that plane. If you can imagine different-heighted cones, take it a step further and call the height the magnitude. I imagine that the sky’s view of a sunset is like that topographical function with peaks and valleys, and the higher the peaks, the more energy and attention the given vantage point of the sunset attracted. In a beautiful world, every sunset should have uniform height density (i.e. the same magnitude everywhere), but sunsets are underappreciated and often go unseen. In an imperfect world, however, this is what I imagine as the sky’s view of the sunsets we see so narrowly on Earth.

When I think of sunsets, I think about Saint-Exupery’s ‘The Little Prince’, and I wonder about the lamplighter. For those without context, the lamplighter (as I recall) is a small man who lives on a planet that is so small he can traverse it in a few steps. Furthermore, his job is to keep the lamps lit during the night and off during the day. However, as a byproduct of the circumference being so small, the man spends all of his time turning on and off lights as the sun quickly sets and rises. Throughout the toil, the man has one saving grace: sunsets. He gets to watch a million sunsets and I think that’s a beautiful thing.