vapor trail sunrise

Is this sunrise any less beautiful if we realize that most of the “clouds” are actually jet airplane vapor trails?

Human perception of beauty seems to be generally modeled after nature:  people tend to see beauty when the pattern of light or sound is a pattern that is not totally random (noise, mess) and not totally orderly (checkerboard, repeated tones).  We find total randomness and total order to be both boring and annoying, but somewhere in between, like a face or a flower, to be pleasant.  Even with faces and flowers, though we like symmetry, we prefer the tiniest bit of variation from perfection to make it “natural”; this is perhaps why in some periods of fashion history a mole on a cheek or edge of the lip was called a “beauty mark.” 

Nature provides this middle ground between randomness and order.  Nature has a lot of order to it; think of a shell’s lines or spirals, the uncurled self-similar branching of a fern, or the fact that the spacing of branches in a tree can be described by the Fibonacci sequence of adding the last two numbers to get the next one in a sequence. 

Humans are more likely to produce boring orderly patterns when they are intentionally crafting something artificial, like an airplane.  The paths that airplanes take are fairly orderly, due to decisions and pathways designed to keep them from crashing into each other.  But the whole picture above is a mix of trees (plus an artifice: a streetlight), wisps of “natural” clouds, jet contrails, and the way the trails are gradually spread and bent by the wind.

Humans create art on purpose to present beauty and meaning to the observer.  But everyday human behavior such as flying a plane, or cracking a wry half-smile in a moment of shared realization, especially in combination with some elements provided by nature, may produce beauty as well.

Ultimately, this distinction between nature and artifice breaks down.  Our products, technology, and behaviors, and vapor trails are, at least indirectly, part of the processes set in motion eons ago. 

Speaking of humans and other parts of nature mixing together; my dog is getting patient about not tugging at the leash as I stop to take photos like this.