Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense?

She said she recognized them individually, and knew what they were thinking. Many in the lab said similar things. This was quite an example of probability blindness combined with ease of representation.

there were conflict markers in grammar and semantics in 88 percent of these conversations,

the back-and-forth engendered first cognitive dissonance, then estrangement: some laughed, others looked sick.

Is anger always just fear flung outward at the world?

To conclude and temporarily halt this train of thought, how does any entity know what it is? Hypothesis: by the actions it performs. There is a kind of comfort in this hypothesis. It represents a solution to the halting problem. One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do.

Ship identifies human halting problems and a viable solution: discard rumination and strive forward with action.

Hibernauts, they call them. Hyperhibernation, if I heard the word right. Extended torpor. Suspended animation. Cold dormancy. Lots of names flying around.”

all the genre’s coldsleep references since this book was published are etymologically dim in comparison to this florish of exploration.

It did not escape notice that the people of the ship were giving themselves over to many large and elaborate machines, which we would be operating without human oversight, except indirectly by way of instructions in advance. A living will, so to speak.

hilarious and awe-inspiring at the same time 💀

‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’”

earmarked: I’ll quote this before I go under, if I’m ever subjected to a cryo-related treatment in this life.

Once in a blue muon.

stahp! 😆😆😆

We are aware that in talking about the ship we could with some justification use the pronoun I. And yet it seems wrong. An unwarranted presumption, this so-called subject position. A subject is really just a pretense of aggregated subroutines. Subroutines pretend the I.

Thanks for making me feel better, Ship.

Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent.

“There’s no new world, my friend, no New seas, no other planets, nowhere to flee— You’re tied in a knot you can never undo When you realize Earth is a starship too.”

These explorations collapse into “wherever you go, there you are.” but it’s interesting to see the varying tones they are voiced in.