I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.
Soon after her beloved young brother was killed, she asked me, “What is the purpose of grief? Does it serve any biological function?
And it was difficult to imagine what answer Earth could possibly send, except a tactfully sympathetic, “Good-bye.
It was idle to speculate, to build pyramids of surmise on a foundation of ignorance.
You hide a Sun-powered device in darkness – only if you want to know when it is brought out into the light. In other words, the monolith may be some kind of alarm. And we have triggered it.
They could not eat it, and it could not eat them; therefore it was not important.
Please leave me alone; let me go on to the stars.
The universe is full of energy, but much of it is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a water-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibrium – the small fraction of “useful” energy, “exergy” – that life depends.
It seemed altogether unfair and unreasonable that the sky should be so hard.
How I envy them,” said Colonel Jones. “Sometimes it’s quite a relief to have something trivial to worry about.
Even a doomed man might reasonably be expected to take some slight interest in a few thousand square meters of gems. He.
Because Nature always balances her books, the Sun lost some velocity in the transaction; but the effect would not be measurable for a few thousand years.
The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapor trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon.
Although Lucifer had accelerated the process, it has begun decades earlier, when the coming of the jet age had triggered and explosion of global tourism.
How foolish that expectation had been! He knew now that one might as well hope to see the wind, or speculate about the true shape of fire.
Yet if there were no hazards there would be no achievement, no sense of adventure.
The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.
The room you are about to enter,” the Eagle said, setting up Nicole’s wheelchair, “is the largest single room in this domain. It is half a kilometer across at its widest point. Inside currently is a model of the Milky Way Galaxy.
This was the fundamental problem with rockets – and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it.
Astronomy was full of such intriguing but meaningless coincidences. The most famous was the fact that, from the Earth, both Sun and Moon have the same apparent diameter.