162 Quotes by Peter Watts

The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact.

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

Imagine you are a machine.Yes, I know. But imagine you're a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information.I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform.

Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her.

Everyone’s got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He must have; the population had been dropping for decades.

Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

Technology implies belligerence.

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.