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a prudent form of self-defense—since any society that’s violent and stupid enough to self-destruct on H-bombs might easily destroy the entire universe if it survives long enough to invent something with real firepower.
And so, October 13, 1977; 8:29 p.m. EST became the dawning moment of Year Zero to the rest of the universe.
And that’s when it hit them. They owed us an ungodly amount of money.
Collectively, we are wholly empowered to fix the entire mess. But that would result in a needless loss of extravagantly high-paying legal work for all. So we indignantly denounce the situation to our respective patrons, wave our fists at each other in public, and then privately chuckle slyly over drinks.
‘The terms of this contract shall apply past the end of time and the edge of Earth; all throughout the universe; in perpetuity; in any media, whether now known, or hereafter devised; or in any form, whether now known, or hereafter devised.
And even if I turned out to be entirely sane—well then, great, it meant that an alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet. Worse, they were lawyering up.
His Google job was in “business development.” From what I can tell, this is a worldwide backslapping society whose members jet off to conferences, discuss strategic partnerships among their companies, and then race home to ignore each other’s emails.
is there any way to get useful information out of Microsoft Office?”
One of 5,000 members of the highest governing body in the universe, the Guardian Council.
But as anyone who has one will tell you, the real trick with a superpower is knowing its limitations. And mine has plenty. It can help you ace a job interview, but it won’t make you partner. It can get you a second date, but not a girlfriend. And when it comes to Saving the World—well, give me invisibility, telekinesis, or omniscience any day.
The fear is that if people record radio (particularly digital radio), they’ll surely record some music shows, which can easily lead to music piracy, which itself leads swiftly to meth addiction, human cannibalism, and societal collapse.
I mean, I’m a lawyer—not an investment banker! The law is a safe haven for the bright, ambitious, and cripplingly risk-averse
“And throughout all of that … you’ve seriously, honestly, never encountered anything like the Copyright Damages Improvement Act?” “Not even close. Our top legal scholars have researched it thoroughly. And they unanimously agree that it’s the most cynical, predatory, lopsided, and shamelessly money-grubbing copyright law written by any society, anywhere in the universe since the dawn of time itself.”
It was like a color symphony sustaining the perfect chord—one with both an infinite, fractal complexity and the pure simplicity of a low integer.
And as for decisive, these people are clinically paralyzed by ignorance, arrogance, politics, bureaucracy, and, above all else, fear—fear of doing the wrong thing. And it’s not fear of hurting themselves that has them hamstrung. No—what brings on the night sweats is their fear of doing something that might inadvertently benefit someone they hate. And this is a real risk, because the giant music execs seem to hate everyone their businesses touch. They hate each other, for one thing. And boy, do they hate the musicians (spoiled druggie narcissists!). They certainly hate the radio stations that
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“You know New Zealand doesn’t count. It’s like Canada. But to Australia
A Great Acceleration would normally take you from your hopelessly backward state to a full mastery of the Thirteen Disciplines in less than a quarter century. And once a civilization gets to that point, it’s just a standardized test and a few simple essay questions away from joining the club.”
“Trust me on this one. Nothing works better in a story line than infidelity and female bisexuality. It’s an iron law of physics.”
“Any faintly aggressive species is sure to self-destruct long before it can even escape its own solar system. This means that the surviving races that we preside over are basically a bunch of sissies. Just look at how they name their planets.”
And we can’t become Refined until our technology starts advancing at a reasonable rate again. So for now, virtually no one on Earth knows a thing about what’s happening between us and the rest of the cosmos. And meanwhile, your money and mine (and, yes, Judy’s, too) is sitting out there in escrow someplace.
And it’s hard to avoid a Great Acceleration—because a fundamental force of nature drives successful societies to ever-increasing levels of technical sophistication once they pass a certain threshold.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Bill Gates said. “I mean, seriously. Now that you think about it, could Windows really be anything but an alien conspiracy?”
I’d heard many times that Gates’s wealth will save untold millions of lives eventually, given how meticulously and brilliantly he’s investing it to fight poverty and disease.
