More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Pandemics pit humanity against the forces of nature—every person was in it together, fighting to survive—and
“Evolution. Survival of the fittest. Fittest is a thoroughly misunderstood concept in the theory. Fitness is determined by the environment. It’s not about being the biggest or the baddest. It’s about being fit
Both populations adapted to their environments—environments that didn’t require them to innovate. So they reached equilibrium… and stagnated.”
True knowledge is earned, not given.”
“Forgiveness is what makes families work.”
A pound of brain tissue uses twenty times the amount of energy a pound of muscle does.
This planet has become an ecology almost completely dedicated to fueling our massive calorie-hogging brains.”
“And that’s what the early Australians missed. They were still hunter-gatherers when the rest of the world found them. They never developed agriculture, which meant they never developed cities, or city lifestyle, which was conducive to thought and research and invention.”
The anterior fontanelle actually stays open for two years after birth, allowing the brain to expand further. That’s completely different from chimpanzees and bonobos. In their offspring, brain growth occurs mostly in the womb. The anterior fontanelle is closed at the time of birth. Their brain growth is already done.
“Which is why, if you compare our babies to those of apes, the apes’ babies are far more developed. You’d have to gestate a human baby for eighteen to twenty-one months to achieve similar development at birth. Compared to other species, our offspring are born almost completely helpless. They need their parents, so those parents bond with them. As a result, we form villages, social structures to protect our young. Family units. Evolution met that biological challenge—that obstetric dilemma—with a cultural, societal solution. One that makes us human.”
“The quintessential human trait: imagination, fiction, simulation. Powered by energy our brain could use.” “Yes. It’s what makes us completely different from any species before us on this planet. It has been the singular key to all of our progress.
“Capitalism,” Desmond said. “It powered the West—incentivized exploration, exploitation even.”
birth of fiction—a mind that could literally simulate a reality that didn’t exist. A reality radically different from the human’s own.
This human could render possible futures, imagine what life would be like if something existed.
“Agriculture, and the cities it brought with it, brought further changes to human brains, and especially culture. Beginning twelve thousand years ago, for the first time in history, our ancestors planted roots, literally and figuratively. Instead of chasing game and gathering their sustenance, never knowing where their next meal would come from, we had a sustainable source of calories, renewable and controllable.”
“The human brain uses way too much of the caloric energy a human takes in. For millions of years, the brain would have been an evolutionary disadvantage—that is, up until this transcendental mutation, the advent of imagination, came about. Imagination, fictive simulation, is what propelled our species across the planet—literally—and enabled us to conquer it.
The human brain consumes twenty percent of the calories we ingest, but it accounts for only two percent of our weight.
“But the advantage it provided was unimaginable. We are the first species to ever command the planet, to imagine what it could be and reshape it based on the images in our minds.
combination of scientific capitalism is what drove them. Capitalism provided a platform—a societal construct, if you will—for distributing value across a population, in particular to reward minds that imagined and implemented things that brought advantage to others.
This dual system is the most powerful construct to date: capitalism to manage risk and share rewards; science to expand efficiency and resources.”
Globalization is to the human race what the internet is to computers—a method for sharing resources and ideas.
The ability to imagine a future that doesn’t exist—to imagine what the world would be like if something changed, if a product or service existed. And these people’s fortunes were made because their visions were accurate—they correctly predicted that something that didn’t already exist both could be created and would be valuable to a specific group of people.
“A world where only one thing matters: the strength of your mind. Where it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what you look like. A world where all wounds can be healed, even the ones in our minds. Where a person can start over.”
Responsibility is the difference. You took responsibility for your own actions. You made your choices.
it symbolized technology in general. As do the other clever characters in the story. The blue Caterpillar smoking a hookah, who questions Alice about her identity crisis, is another representation of technology—one that is impartial, but forces us to discover who we are.
technology both shrinks and expands our world.
She is eventually put on trial for growing too large—for taking the very air the other animals breathe.” “Like a mass extinction,” Nigel said slowly. “The Quaternary extinction. Or the mass extinction currently happening on Earth.”
Daedalus had created the Labyrinth so intricately, so cleverly, that even he himself could barely escape it. The tale was a cautionary one—about geniuses creating devices with unintended consequences.
The Big Bang wasn’t a singular event—it was one in a cycle of many big bangs. At the end of this universe there will be only energy, then another big bang will occur, and so on. This has been going on for an infinite amount of time. And will continue for just as long.”
The phenomenon Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’.”
how delicate the social fabric of the human race truly was. People’s confidence in government and police—the order of things—was the glue that held society together.
That paradox—now called the Fermi Paradox—consumed the group for a very long time. They believed that this was the greatest mystery of all time. Why are we alone? Where is everyone?”
These people, whoever they were, had conquered the human race. Not with guns or airplanes or battleships, but with science so advanced it looked like magic.
If you built a computer large enough, you still couldn’t transfer yourself to the machine, because the brain is more than simply a data processing device.
