162 Quotes by Peter Watts

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why.

Cities are the graveyard of Mankind.

Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we – we were the flukes and the fossils. We.

I thought it would be cool to make one of the Gang a synesthete, reasoning that someone with cross-wired senses might have an advantage at deciphering the language of aliens with different sensory modalities; then, as I was putting Blindsight to bed, a paper appeared suggesting that synesthesias might be used to solve formal cognitive problems.129 This validates me, and I wish it happened more often.130.

There was no shortage of perspectives. The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic.

But deceleration is for pansies. We’re headed for the stars.

Why’s a sticky word, though. It’s not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as – as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it’s not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.

It’s the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon’s just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they’re coded the right way. It’s all just pattern.

We appear to be hardwired to punish those who have slighted us, even if – and this is the counterintuitive bit – even if our acts of vengeance hurt us more than those who have trespassed against us.