14 Quotes by George B. Dyson

Each question was precisely the best one based on the information he had uncovered so far. His logic was faultless – he never asked a question that was irrelevant or erroneous. His questions came in rapid-fire order, revealing a mind that was lightning-fast and error-free.

If life, by some chance, happens to have originated, and survived, elsewhere in the universe, it will have had time to explore an unfathomable diversity of forms. Those best able to survive the passage of time, adapt to changing environments, and migrate across interstellar distances will become the most widespread. A life form that assumes digital representation, for all or part of its life cycle, will be able to travel at the speed of light.

Are we using digital computers to sequence, store, and better replicate our own genetic code, thereby optimizing human beings, or are digital computers optimizing our genetic code – and our way of thinking – so that we can better assist in replicating them?

Over long distances, it is expensive to transport structures, and inexpensive to transmit sequences. Turing machines, which by definition are structures that can be encoded as sequences, are already propagating themselves, locally, at the speed of light. The notion that one particular computer resides in one particular location at one time is obsolete.

If humans, instead of transmitting to each other reprints and complicated explanations, developed the habit of transmitting computer programs allowing a computer-directed factory to construct the machine needed for a particular purpose, that would be the closest analogue to the communication methods among cells.