#net

Planetary exploration satisfies our inclination for great enterprises and wanderings and quests that has been with us since our days as hunters and gatherers on the East African savannahs a million years ago. By chance—it is possible, I say, to imagine many skeins of historical causality in which this would not have transpired—in our age we are able to begin again. Exploring other worlds employs precisely the same qualities of daring, planning, cooperative enterprise, and valor that mark the finest in military tradition. Never mind the night launch of an Apollo spacecraft bound for another world. That makes the conclusion foregone. Witness mere F-14s taking off from adjacent flight decks, gracefully canting left and right, afterburners flaming, and there’s something that sweeps you away—or at least it does me. And no amount of knowledge of the potential abuses of carrier task forces can affect the depth of that feeling. It simply speaks to another part of me. It doesn’t want recriminations or politics. It just wants to fly. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#planetary-exploration #age

Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time. ↗

— Robin Wasserman

#digital-identity #digitalization #identity #internet #meta

Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself ↗

— Pierre Nora

#memory #prophecy #social-networks #imagination

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them. ↗

— Janet Fitch

#janet-fitch #white-oleander #inspirational

When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world. ↗

— Eric Schmidt

#being #how #i #i remember #infinite

They went back there, looked at all the computers, asked me to come in and tell them what all the computers were for specifically so they knew how to dismantle the network I had been running. ↗

— Sherman Austin

#back #been #come #computers #dismantle

The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. ↗

— Norbert Wiener

#intelligence #robots #intelligence

Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress ↗

— Steve Grand

#control #cybernetics #intelligence

I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area. ↗

— Katherine Dunn

#fascinating #fertile #genetic #i #i think

[Constance Bennett] never tired of acting, said Peter Plant. “She liked it, she enjoyed it, and she worked very hard at it. When she was making a film, she would really be busy preparing for the next day’s scenes. I would visit her for half an hour, and then she would go back to her script. She had what her father had, a photographic memory. Richard Bennett, I understand, could read a play through once, and he knew the whole play, and everyone else’s cues. I have the good fortune to have inherited that, and it’s made many people think me more intelligent than I am. ↗

— Eve Golden

#business