A question regarding imagination more than anything else: Should I think of clouds as gigantic, magnanimous objects or as little more than opaque space?

The clouds rolling through the Midwest this time of year are truly amazing beasts to gawk at. Every day the weather is a little bit different -- from tornado-bearing storm front to herds of tiny, migrating cumulus 'mellows meandering their way through a mostly blue pasture. Given my recent venture to Titan, I can't help but attempt to visualize our cream-puff overlords with the same awe I would grant a giant like Saturn.

But are they really all that significant? What do I even mean by significant? Of all the cosmic particles that swirled around Sol's ancient accretion disk to form planets and moons, some of that matter was relegated to be the oil on the frenchbread, so to speak. The whisps of paint that color our otherwise blue-green globe.

Are they nothing but paint? A sparse accumulation of dynamic nebulae? Or is the shiver that runs down my spine when I'm in the presence of such a huge, arcing canopy justified? Is it just naiveté -- much like how I viewed the small lumps in my childhood home of Illinois as grand until I learned about "real" hills and mountains?

SigmaX