Questions To Stretch Daddy's Mind

Daniel asks me many questions that follow a similar format, and he'll ask them any time we're together.  For the most part, he wants to know about superlatives:

1.  "Who's the nicest person you know?"

2.  "Who's the meanest person in the world?"

[etc.]

But sometimes the speculation that he invites can be pretty interesting in its own right.  The other night, just as I was tucking him into bed, he asked me which, do I think, is more dangerous:  hoverboards or jetpacks.  I don't think he was assuming that they exist at present - although I imagine he's quite confident that they will exist, possibly very soon (and he may be right...). 

I had to think about the hoverboard-vs-jetpack question.  I voted for hoverboard:  on a hoverboard, you're floating  such a small height off the ground that you're likely to slam into objects - trees, buildings, people, whereas with jetpacks, you can gan an elevation considerably higher than the buildings around you.

But then, just as abruptly, I changed my vote:  I decided that jetpacks were likely more dangerous, since their ability to rise to great altitudes means that, if you were ever to fall - let's say, you ran out of "juice" - then the casualties would be much worse than those involving some wimply old low-flying hoverboard.

I told my niece about Daniel's question, and she immediately said she thought jetpacks would be more dangerous than hoverboards, for exactly the reasons I stated above - even though I hadn't told he about my own perspective.

It took me awhile even to know hot to think through Daniel's question, but with a little help from the young'uns, I'm slowly exapanding my categoires of thought.

(April/May, 2015)