If you throw a plastic Whiffle ball across our toy room, it’s likely that it’s going to travel in a curved path over the jumble of assorted blocks, staring toddlers, and DVDs that are NO TOUCH, and shouldn’t even be on the floor anyhow. It’ll start low, arc upward, and then fall back into a downward trajectory before plopping onto the floor and rolling to a stop.

The ball doesn’t travel in a straight line. I mean, unless you really zing it. In the backyard, where there’s more space, you can really zing it, but the eventual outcome remains the same: It’s going to lose altitude. That’s called gravity, baby.

But what if gravity said, “Screw this, man. You guys do whatever the hell you want.” Then, you could really chuck that thing, and it’d just keep going.

It would sail in a perfectly straight line, whiffing past curious peasant farmers, exotic and surprised animals, and foreign dishes that you or I might find gross. Onward it would sail, until it came back and hit you in the back of the head 30.516605 days later, assuming both that you could hurl it at 34 miles-per-hour, and remember exactly where you’d been standing.

And sure, that might be really cool, but what if everyone did it? Then we’d have to crawl around everywhere we went, or risk being pelted by multiple transcontinental Whiffle balls, and the sky would be all dark and whiffly-sounding. And maybe not everyone has access to a Whiffle ball, so people in distant lands would have to throw other stuff, like funny hats, passports, or Berlitz language tapes.

They’d have to pass a law, and get all the countries to agree: Don’t throw things around the world, just to try to hit yourself in the back of your own head, thirty days later.