If I were on Jupiter right now, in its fierce gravity, I would be turtling around on all fours weighing more than 200 kilograms. Pressed into the sofa like an anvil, I doubt I could get to the fridge for a beer. If I were on Mercury, I would be 30 kilograms, running marathons, leaping over pyramids, hillocks and Great Walls. (But what Mercurian would build a Great Wall when his enemies could leap it like fleas?)

If I were on Pluto, I would weigh 5 kilograms and could do a thousand one-armed push-ups in its insipid gravity – three light steps would take me to visit a distant friend – or launch me into space. But on Earth, with its mass being a happy 5.97 billion trillion tonnes, I am a comfortable 80 kilograms, which suits me fine – I am neither crushed nor windborne. It’s almost as if I were built for the place.

If I lived in Kabul, I would be condemned as a dangerous heretic, unable to believe, or hide my disbelief, in Mohammed’s claim to be an amanuensis for our creator. But here my atheism is a norm and a yawn.

If I walked the grounds of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion enrolment in quantum physics, the undergraduates would nudge each other and whisper as I passed by: “There he goes. The dumbest man alive. Completely unable to grasp the Collatz conjecture.”

But if I were placed in France in the time before Christ, I would be a genius, perhaps even a god, once I explained the cause of the Black Death, pointed out the planets, proved the world was round, wowed them with simple hygiene, and explained my Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. The Gauls would behead me or worship me – possibly both.

And if, while out walking today, I were to take a shortcut through the grounds of a kindergarten, the kids’ eyes would boggle at me, beholding a Brothers Grimm Methuselah more ancient and loose-skinned than any imaginary mastodon.

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Emerging from that kindergarten onto the footpath and into the entanglement of walking frames and unbalanced perambulations that is an aged care excursion just disgorged from a minibus, I would be transformed, and those ancient day-trippers would think me dangerously lithe and coltish.

If I were born in Myanmar, where the average height is 160 centimetres, I would be a veritable Gulliver and, barring injury or sloth, at 187 centimetres, I would certainly represent my country at basketball. We would be thrashed by everyone at the Olympics, of course, for my teammates are short and I am ungainly. But I would demand a selfie alongside LeBron James, both of us beaming makeshift friendship, with me just reaching to his sternum. Sitting on his mantelpiece thereafter, that photograph would be captioned: “LeBron Meets The Myanmar Giant.”