162 Quotes by Peter Watts

The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.

How do you say ‘We come in peace’ when the very words are an act of war?

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

Things get even messier when linked into networks, which can literally scatter one’s mind even at today’s rudimentary levels of connectivity. The “transactive memory system” called Google is already rewiring the parts of our brains that used to remember facts locally; now those circuits store search protocols for remote access of a distributed database.74 And Google doesn’t come anywhere close to the connectivity of a real hive mind.

To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were.

Comparable biochemistries. They might eat us. “Whoever these beings are, they don’t even live in sunlight. No territorial overlap, no resource overlap, no basis for conflict. There’s no reason we shouldn’t get along just fine.” “On the other hand,” Szpindel said, “technology implies belligerence.” Michelle snorted softly. “According to a coterie of theoretical historians who’ve never actually met an alien, yes. Maybe now we get to prove them wrong.” And.

You are. I’m just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we’re all gonna die before it ends.

Intuition is not clairvoyance. It’s not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously – but no less rigorously – than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person.

Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.