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The fourth power was money. The forms we built took on life of their own, and the power we created escaped from our grasp and devoured us.
Some things are more important than keeping your kid safe.
“All species must leave their birth worlds, or give up their technological development, or die. You are very close.”
“Worlds aren’t meant to support technological species. They’re birthing burrows, not warrens.”
beauty is worth preserving whether it’s alive or not.
Trying to keep all our ideas organized without real threading, without the algorithms constantly picking out key ideas and sorting possible approaches and marking the valence and weight of our responses, felt like analyzing river chemistry by drinking a glass of water.
“He had to fight to be seen. And when he isn’t, when people get it wrong—it mostly hasn’t happened in front of you because most people aren’t assholes, but sometimes he can barely talk afterward.” She paused. “I’m telling you this because he hates to talk about it, and he shouldn’t have to. Don’t bring it up with him.”
“Maybe someday humans will grow out of that stuff entirely, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
We survive by being stubborn about who we are, whatever else happens.”
The corporations tried to do the same thing, but they’d create needs in order to fill them. It looked symbiotic, but it was one-sided, because most of the needs weren’t real. Or else they created artificial shortages of true needs, to make their goods worth more. They’re parasites.”
When I think of a tree, I think of moving between the branches, and how whenever I reach out I find a new branch that takes me where I need to go. The universe is the same way. If you reach out, you’ll eventually grasp the next branch. Sometimes people reach in the wrong direction, or miss their grip, or find a dead stick that cracks, but that’s not the tree’s fault. There’s always a next branch, you just need to find it.
I trust you to do what you think is right. That’s how I trust most people.
Sometimes we find peace in a moment because we have to. It was, of course, a brief moment.
“We should tell them that no matter what you do to us, we survive. And we remember who we are.”
“All postindustrial technologies are potential extinction events in waiting. It’s why we spread out.”
Earth is our symbiosis. We’ve screwed it up, badly, but we’re trying to fix it now, and we won’t do right by any new relationship if we leave it behind.”
you could always do something to hold off the bad times, but you could never hold them off forever. Maybe this time? Long enough, at least, to get the world to a point where it could survive the badness?
