Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

What if every time you said money you replaced that word with the word trust. Here, I will pay you ten units of my trust.” He looked at Ta Shu and grinned. “A good deal!”

When tigers fight it’s the people who bleed.

He wondered if Shor’s algorithm, which took advantage of quantum superposition to factor large numbers, could be used to define the temporal length of a moment of being. It had to be longer—it felt much longer—than the minimum temporal interval, the Planck interval, which was the time it took a photon moving at the speed of light to move across the Pauli exclusion zone within which two particles could not coexist: that minimal interval of time was 10-44 of a second. A moment of being was more like a second, he felt, maybe three seconds. Meaning each moment of being was, when compared to the minimal interval of time, a near eternity. Much longer in proportion to the minimal interval than the lifetime of the universe was relative to a second. Although it could be argued that the universe’s lifetime had so far been fairly brief. He wondered what the largest prime number he could recite aloud might be.

anything you can say about China that you think might be true, the opposite statement will also be true. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

And capital accumulation without capitalism doesn’t have many opportunities for reinvestment; but silver unspent is just a lump of slag in your basement. Money needs to be spent to become wealth.

if you owe a million, that’s your problem, but if you owe a trillion, that’s your debt holder’s problem.

You can’t push the river.

The moon is death it will kill you Bony dust on bony rocks No trees no air no clouds no creatures Nothing alive not even dirt Harsh and sterile cold and bright Look at it and tremble You think you are an earthly person You think you are alive And in this moment maybe you are But the moon teaches you Another day will come

If democracy came to China they would end up electing idiots, as in America.

Anticipation worse than the act itself, as with so many things. Obviously you had to be alive to suffer.

They could barely even stand, and so naturally they had no standing.

They were looking from death toward life, like ghosts trying to figure out what they should have done when they were in the world.

He had sometimes felt that Winston Churchill’s description of democracy was equally suitable as a description of the Party’s rule in China: the worst possible system, except for all the rest.

We must fight not to fight, even in this fraught moment.

Stating the obvious can sometimes be helpful, but usually it’s only irritating.

although words are acts, and even important acts, there are in the discourse space of the current global civilization simply too many acts. They fill the discourse space so completely that to some degree they create an interference pattern. The resulting vibration of the cultural space exceeds the surface tension of the moment, and a chaos of intersecting waves breaks out and jumbles the surface, such that no new semantic action—no words in any configuration, no matter how reflective of the shared zeitgeist, no matter how persuasive rhetorically—can alter humanity’s current behaviors. There’s too much noise, too many interference patterns canceling each other out, too many laws that need changing. Nothing emerges from this chaos by way of a coherent mass action. There are, in short, limits to speech. Something more may be required.

Power comes out of the end of a gun.