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I remember a reporter asking me why we all flew coach instead of business class when we traveled. It wasn’t simply to keep costs down. NASA didn’t want us getting too comfortable, given that our cockpit would make economy on easyJet look like first class.
You know the drill—our downstream bandwidth is prioritized for monitoring metrics over research data, then data over text, text over images, and images over video, so be frugal with messages or you’ll cause a logjam for everyone else. You’re better off going to the cache server for news rather than making your own requests and waiting for a round-trip refresh that may never come.
Time is an oddity. One moment seems to drag, the next rushes by. Whether it’s bewilderingly fast or deathly slow, time is painful.
I remind myself that, regardless of how good or smart or super-duper intelligent someone is, no one is above the scientific process. Einstein overturned Newton. One day, someone may do the same to Einstein. Who knows? And were he alive, Einstein would love to see that next step unfold in our understanding of the universe. Scientists don’t care about being right or wrong, they care about learning. Loyalty is for soldiers, not scientists.
“Trust only what you can prove. Not what people tell you.”
The irony is, all his efforts to wrest control of life are a clear sign of a life out of control.
Kill a soldier and you reduce an army by one. Maim them, and you reduce the fighting force by three, four, or five soldiers—however many it takes to care for the wounded.”
Mars was formed at the same time as Earth. After an initial burst of insane geological activity, and hydrocycles that put the flood of Noah to shame, a massive impact formed the southern Hellas Basin, shocking the core of the planet and causing it to fall dormant. Earth raced ahead with the development of life, while Mars remained frozen in time.
my fear was of dying, not death. It may seem like a fine distinction, but, to me, dying is an act, a torturous process undergone by the living. Death is a state—never to wake again. There’s a permanence to death that defies my notion of life.
Have we got this all wrong? Could artificial intelligence be the salvation we have long sought? Is heaven etched on silicon?
