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The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting.
On the floor of the lake, there were no people. I couldn’t imagine a better place to live.
residents saw little of the profit.
grew into one of the most developed spots in the colony. It had electricity and plumbing, shops, billiard parlors, a bistro, tennis courts, a soccer field, and even a movie theater. It also had miners succumbing to lung disease and children dying from contaminated water.
People and their emotions puzzled me. They were stupidly complex, and there was no way to break them apart and see what was inside.
loved the woman who wanted to know what the cuttlefish was saying.
“What do you mean, don’t change anything? I’m an engineer!”
these were beings who recognized their own selves in a mirror, something that dogs and cats and even some of the smartest primates failed to do.
From underneath, looking up into the filtered sun, she found the Loner’s pale belly surprisingly hard to make out—a ghost as diffuse as his black dorsal silhouette would appear to anyone looking down on him through the darkening waves. Countershading—Thayer’s law: a trick that fish had used for the last hundred and fifty million years to make themselves disappear both into and against the light.
Loner simply swiped at the bubbles with his left pectoral fin for the sheer pleasure of dispersing them. The behavior floored her, although a part of her knew it shouldn’t. Mantas had a brain-to-body ratio far higher than most fish, as high as many mammals. A giant oceanic manta ray brain was the largest and heaviest of any animal that breathed water. The telencephalon and cerebellum—parts of the brain devoted in mammals to higher functioning—were enormous.
Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it. If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.
“What’s a wardrobe?” “Just a clothes closet with a trust fund.
You can’t get hurt by a doll.” Perhaps his grandmother had never seen a horror film.
Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn’t care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.
Then the Pacific lay all in front of them, a third of the world.
planet’s greatest ocean—the surf’s relentless growl, four billion years old—wasn’t enough to lift her hopes, which ebbed faster than any tide.
The sea buoyed her, like warm silk on her bare arms and legs.
like a babe in Toyland, set loose in the greatest playground any child had ever seen. She played hide-and-seek with octopuses and tag with pygmy seahorses.
His resentment at her time away had softened as his own work on the global ocean conveyor grew more interesting and rewarding.
Evelyne had been taught that nothing could live so far down, under such pressure, so far from sunlight. But life was never very good at obeying human logic.
No human being knew what life on Earth really looked like. How could they? They lived on the land, in the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers. All the forests and savannas and wetlands and deserts and grasslands on all the continents were just afterthoughts, ancillaries to the Earth’s main stage.
‘Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.’ John Lennon.”
My new motto!
This was the part of the project that Evelyne couldn’t comprehend. Why would you use the sea to plan for space trips? This was the voyage.
The journalists did not report that the crew of Mission Six consistently outperformed their male colleagues in almost every metric, from the quality and quantity of their underwater research to the ease of their close-quarters cooperation. If an all-male NASA were really looking for proof that women could do research and perform well in space, they had the data on every day of that two-week adventure.
“A prediction is but an explanation in advance.”
The noise of these tiny shrimp rivals anything in the deep, even the booming of the great whales. When a whole colony of pistol shrimp start snapping together, the chorus can jam the Navy’s most sophisticated sonar. The snap of a single pistol shrimp is louder than the roar of a jet engine from half a block away. And the explosion made by its snapping claw creates a wave of bubbles strong enough to stun a large fish or break a glass jar. These bubbles contain so much energy, they emit flashes of light almost as hot as the surface of the sun.
She wrote of going back day after day to spy on one of the ocean’s weirdest partnerships. She watched for hours as a pistol shrimp worked away, digging out a burrow big enough for two families. But the other resident of this communal den wasn’t a shrimp or another crustacean or even a fellow invertebrate. It was a goby, a small ray-finned fish who relied on his shrimp partner to dig out and maintain their den. The shrimp is a great digger but is almost blind. The goby stands watch outside their shared burrow, catching food for them both. The shrimp constantly feels for the fish with long
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watch an excited giant cuttlefish moving about near the entrance to its den. The creature was pulsing in the most extraordinary colors. Evie drew close, by centimeters, trying not to startle the animal and cut short its crazed display. The cuttlefish failed to pay her any mind. It stared straight past her into deeper water, as patterns of reds and oranges and pale greens cycled across its skin like the strobing lights in a disco. She thought she had seen all the colors a cuttlefish could make, but this one made cinnamons and russets, scarlets and carmines and clarets unknown to her. It flashed
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We’d each gotten the fruits of our own labors. Ideas were cheap; turning them into reality was hard.
a white and orange clownfish half the length of my hand swam into view, followed by another. From the right came a small school of regal tangs, their tails an insane shade of canary-yellow. The dorsal regions of the flattened tangs were swirled with mysterious dark patches that looked like Hebrew letters written by a moving finger. The stripes on the clownfish, too, seemed legible. The clownfish and the tangs swam together in the space between my face and the ceiling, and the markings on their sides as they flippered back and forth formed sentences and paragraphs blinking too quickly for me to
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