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plants, animals, and bacteria all have had important roles in the present composition of our atmosphere. Without life, the atmosphere would be very different. It’s possible that such an atmosphere would not be able to shield the surface of the Earth against solar winds and ultraviolet rays, and the oceans would evaporate. Soon, greenhouse effects would turn the Earth’s atmosphere into a copy of Venus’s, and then water vapor would be lost to space over time. After several billion years, the Earth would be dry.”
“There was no pain.” Dr. Zhang’s voice was so low that it sounded like the buzzing of a mosquito. Tianming felt a hand land on his left shoulder. “It’s a combination of a massive dose of barbitone, muscle relaxant, and potassium chloride. The barbitone takes effect first and puts the patient into a deep sleep, the muscle relaxant stops his breathing, and the potassium chloride stops the heart. The whole process takes no more than twenty, thirty seconds.”
He thought of “The Judgment” by Franz Kafka, in which a father curses his son and sentences him to death. The son agrees, as easily as someone agreeing to take out the trash or to shut the door, and leaves the house, runs through the streets onto the bridge, and leaps over the balustrade to his death. Later, Kafka told his biographer that as he wrote the scene, he was thinking of “a violent ejaculation.”
At first, he didn’t understand where the light had come from. It was like a sun seen through a heavy veil of clouds, only appearing to observers as a faint disk. It was only when it disappeared that people realized that it was the source of all light during the day.
“Tianming, did you know that the euthanasia law was passed specifically for you?”
Medieval Europe was materially impoverished compared to the Classical Rome of a thousand years earlier, and was more intellectually repressed.
They would discover a torture technique he had once read in a history book—first, the victim was whipped until not an inch of his skin remained intact; then the victim’s body was tightly wrapped in bandages; and after the victim had stopped bleeding, the bandages would be torn off, ripping open all the wounds at once—then send signals replicating such torture into his brain.
when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism.
Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human. So, to all of you I say this: When you think about heading into outer space without looking back, please reconsider. The cost you must pay is far greater than you could imagine.
But, in our age, conscience and duty are not ideals: an excess of either is seen as a mental illness called social-pressure personality disorder. You should seek treatment.”
The entire process from Luo Ji turning over the authority to getting it back took a total of eighteen hours. Yet that would have been long enough for droplets to destroy the ring of nuclear bombs surrounding the Sun and deprive humanity of the ability to broadcast their locations. The Trisolarans’ failure to do so was widely considered their greatest strategic blunder during the war, and humanity, covered in cold sweat, let out a held breath.
Experts believed that although science and technology usually contributed to the elimination of totalitarianism, when crises threatened the existence of civilization, science and technology could also give birth to new totalitarianism.
Experiments showed that AIs tended not to make correct decisions when faced with the complex conditions of deterrence—unsurprising, since correct judgment required more than logical reasoning. Moreover, changing from a dictatorship-by-man to a dictatorship-by-machine wouldn’t have made people feel any better, and was politically worse.
I can’t stand the attitude shared by everyone in your profession: If you think someone has a mental disorder, you treat everything he says as merely the delusion of a diseased mind.”
We walked out of Africa; we walked for seventy thousand years; we came into Australia.
Did you build this four-dimensional fragment? You told me that you came from the sea. Did you build the sea?
It wasn’t the result of carelessness; on the contrary, to create this kind of utter chaos required great effort and design.
Death is the only lighthouse that is always lit. No matter where you sail, ultimately, you must turn toward it. Everything fades in the world, but Death endures.”
Take a distant star, a barely visible dot. Anyone casually glancing at it would say: Oh, that star is safe; that star will not threaten us.
“Thank you for the cigars.”
In the cosmos, no matter how fast you are, someone will be faster; no matter how slow you are, someone will be slower.
Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.
Patterns drawn on prehistoric pottery survived about ten thousand years. Cave paintings in Europe were from about forty thousand years ago. If you count the markings made on stones back when our ancestors, the hominids, made the first tools as information, then the earliest instances occurred during the Pliocene, two point five million years ago. And we did indeed find information left one hundred million years ago, though it wasn’t left by humans: dinosaur footprints.
Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.
A museum was built for visitors; a tombstone was built for the builders.
Van Gogh’s representation of space had left a deep impression on her. In his subconscious, space seemed to have structure. Cheng Xin wasn’t an expert in theoretical physics back then, but she knew that according to string theory, space, like material objects, was made up of many microscopic vibrating strings. Van Gogh had painted these strings: In his paintings, space—like mountains, wheat fields, houses, and trees—was filled with minute vibrations. Starry Night had left an indelible mark in her mind, and she was amazed to see it again four centuries later on Pluto.
Twice, she had been placed in a position of authority second only to God, and both times she had pushed the world into the abyss in the name of love.
said. “Let me repeat: They are just guesses. There’s no real scientific proof. Don’t think about it too much. Focus on what’s before your eyes; focus on
The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts.
“Actually, son, it’s not hard to live a wonderful life. Listen to me. Choose a tough, world-class problem, one that requires only a sheet of paper and a pencil, like Goldbach’s Conjecture or Fermat’s Last Theorem, or a question in pure natural philosophy that doesn’t need pencil and paper at all, like the origin of the universe, and then throw yourself entirely into research. Think only of planting, not reaping, and as you concentrate, an entire lifetime will pass before you know it. That’s what people mean by settling down. Or do the opposite, and make earning money your only goal. Spend all
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