Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that was almost an article of faith among scientists.
One sample is poor statistics, my math prof used to say.
Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.
Reliability depended on redundancy and automatic checking, and human intervention was much more likely to do harm than good.
History never repeats itself – but historical situations recur.” As.
He might himself be putting on a superb act, following the performance by logic alone and with his own strange emotions completely untouched, as an anthropologist might take part in some primitive rite. The fact that he uttered the appropriate sounds, and made the expected responses, really proved nothing at all.
Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.
Minkowski spacetime.
The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.
While there was life, there was hope;.
Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five space-suited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world.
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.