While there was life, there was hope;.
Can you sum up your ideas in less than – oh, a thousand bits?
They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on December 31, 1999 – but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice.
What had been a perceived threat, a lien in a sense on future human behavior, was quickly reduced to a historical curiosity.
It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love.
Michael O’Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion.
Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it?
During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora’s box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars.
No need to go to the dolphins,” interjected Max Brailovsky. “One of the brightest engineers in my class was fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him last, he was working in a garage. And he’d won a gold medal for designing space-stations. What a waste!
Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced.
But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography – much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines.
Oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?
Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become – for a while, at least – any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary.
When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them – Io – is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.
Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on those planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation. But however far they travel from their native world, human beings can never escape the diurnal rhythm, set ages ago by its cycle of light and darkness.
The Ramans do everything in threes.
It seemed to him that his ship was rather like a stranded whale that had managed a difficult birth in an alien element. He hoped that the new calf would survive.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought.
Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.