Extinction Code (Extinction, #1)
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“You are not far off, Professor. What she lacks is the conscious desire to create in her own image. In effect, to evolve from created to creator.”
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only when we face the unknown will we meet ourselves for the first time.”
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Stephen Hawking said. That whenever an advanced society encounters a more primitive one, things usually don’t turn out well for the latter.
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“The air down here is close to ninety percent nitrogen and nine percent oxygen.” Such a mixture would leave them dead in seconds. By contrast, the Earth’s atmosphere was seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen and one percent argon.
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“Dr. Bishop, I believe it means that biological life forms once inhabited this structure.”
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like everything else in life, the truth is never so clear-cut.”
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Kardashev scale.
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Nikolai Kardashev in 1964,
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Instead of being useless, scientists were only beginning to understand that non-coding DNA helped to regulate how our genes expressed themselves.
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“I’m saying, just like computer code, DNA is also written in a binary format. If the message is in there, that’s how we’ll find it.”
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“The human mind is a tremendous learning machine, unmatched by any computer we’ve ever made or ever will make. What we try to teach people, however, and what they come away with are often two different things.”
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ASCII stood for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, by far the most ubiquitous format used for text files and web pages.
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Each letter, number or special character was often represented by a string of eight zeroes
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and ones (a byte). Therefore, the letter A was represented by the following b...
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Of course, it was easy to project human feelings onto a thoroughly non-human entity.
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“Apophenia is the tendency to see patterns and connections even when they don’t exist. It’s got something to do with how our brains are wired.”
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“Zero and one are
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basic principles of mathematics, so are prime numbers. I’ve read my fair share of articles on the challenges of communicating with an alien civilization. I guess one of the perks of being online all day long is you come across some really weird stuff. Maybe they’ve been watching us for a long time, knew everything about how we live and communicate…”
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Sentinel.”
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Sentinel is a group of powerful men determined to squash any possible contact between humans and extraterrestrials. They apparently formed sometime in the 1940s when UFO sightings were becoming more and more commonplace. But it wasn’t to help hide any crashed saucer. They were convinced that if humans ever encountered an alien race—peaceful or not—such a meeting would lead to our destruction.
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Sentinel would simply compromise them. Plant drugs in their cars, accuse them of pedophilia, rape.
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Just ask Julian Assange. Their other tool is ridicule and, when that doesn’t work, straight-out misinformation. Flood the zone, as you Americans say, with contradictory information. Soon, no one knows what to believe.
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“But it’s with their propaganda arm that things get really scary. These days, fewer and fewer people trust the news, but everyone likes movies. Count up the number of feature films where aliens are portrayed as the good guys and then count up the ones where they’re invaders, monsters and generally out to destroy us. Again, follow the money. That’s what I did and nine times out of ten, the project led back to someone connected wit...
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These beings, with all of their technological advancement, were still prisoners of their own evolutionary history.
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castaway theory,”
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tinkerer theory.”
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generation ship.”
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“Lately, there’s been more and more of us who’ve come to see the organization for what it is. A state within a state. Their original mandate was to protect the world from outside threats. But with time, that unchecked power began to corrupt them. What started as a noble enterprise aimed at preventing the human race from killing itself soon became an excuse to create systems of dynastic power.”
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,’”
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Carl Sagan
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the world was brimming with codes.
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“Not a zoo, it was an ark.”
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Ironically, in the end, the joke had been on us, since the seconds and hours freed up by one modern gadget were often spent staring like a zombie at another.
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The aliens’ genetic material was carbon-based. But more than that, when she compared their genome to ours, she saw that seventy-five percent of our DNA was the same.
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Then, with the comparison complete, the computer spat out one additional point of commonality. Mia slumped into the chair, not at all ready for what she was seeing. The alien had Salzburg.
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“Panspermia,”
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Mesonyx.
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“Otherwise known as MAOA.”
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“So man’s legacy of murder and conquest all comes down to a snippet of DNA that got copied wrong.” “History has turned on far less,”
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By killing his rival, the real Adam ensured that his violent genetic tendencies would be passed to his descendants, tainting the entire primate and human family tree.”
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“There’s an old adage that for every answer you receive three more questions arise,”
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Vladimir I. Shcherbak and Maxim A. Makukov have suggested there are mysterious patterns of mathematical symmetry within the human genome. They’ve identified at least nine occasions in which the number thirty-seven occurs. They believe this lends weight to the idea that humans were bio-engineered by an intelligent species.
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‘Biological SETI,’ the idea being that if humans were engineered by an advanced alien species, signs of such a manipulation would likely reside in our DNA.