Not looking. There’s no real return on the investment that I can see. Besides, if I want to take silly chances like that, I’ll just take 290 into the city during rush hour. 
The world is at stake; my own long-term fate is irrelevant.
Untrue. You’ve been advised that you can likely accomplish your mission whether you gaze upon Eros and Aphrodite or not.
As a chick, male beauty doesn’t do it for me. I’d definitely enjoy the esthetic experience of seeing the most beautiful man and woman ever, but it would be like enjoying art. I find ordinary looking balding guys with slight potbellies sexy.
In the summer of my thirtieth year*, there was a moment when I was standing on the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park, a ways past Haystack Butte but not yet in sight of the turnoff to the Grinnell Glacier Overlook trail. There was a flock of bighorn sheep above me on the mountainside, grazing their way towards me.
As I stood there, they nibbled their way in my direction until I found myself in the middle of this flock, totally surrounded by bighorn sheep who were totally unconcerned with my presence. They kept on grazing their way down the hillside until the entire flock was a ways below me. But for several minutes, I had stood in the middle of a flock of bighorn sheep.
That was in the summer of 1983, and it’s still the most amazing thing I have ever experienced in all my time in the great outdoors. It probably always will be.
But that doesn’t lessen or diminish my enjoyment of any of the things I’ve enjoyed since then. Sure, it would be nice if it happened again when I go back to Glacier next summer, but I’d be a fool to expect it or even hope for it. It’s amazing that it happened to me once, and I’m grateful to have ever had that experience.
So I’d take the chance of seeing Aphrodite in all her glory. Because I expect I’d process it the same way. It wouldn’t cause me to enjoy any other womanly beauty any the less, but I’d always be grateful to have seen Aphrodite up close, just the once.
- In my case, the opening lines of “Rocky Mountain High” are off by three years, but the idea is the same. “You know he’d be a poorer man if” he’d never been surrounded by a flock of bighorns.
Yes, I’m saying nice things about John Denver. Deal. 