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“Eeh, eeh, eeh,” Lolly says. “Fuck.”
The inventor framed his proposal as an invitation to partake in a grand scientific undertaking and was baffled that none of the women he courted found this an appealing prospect.
We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.
My species probably won’t be here for much longer; it’s likely that we’ll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it.
The message is this: You be good. I love you.
I think this is one of my favorites so far
In the center of every tree of that era is a circle of perfectly clear and homogeneous wood, and the diameter of that ringless area indicates the size of the tree at the moment of creation. Those are primordial trees, created directly by your hand rather than grown from seedlings.
I asked them to imagine what it would be like if we lived in a world where, no matter how deeply we dug, we kept finding traces of an earlier era of the world. I asked them to imagine being confronted with proof of a past extending so far back that the numbers lost all meaning: a hundred thousand years, a million years, ten million years. Then I asked, wouldn’t they feel lost, like a castaway adrift on an ocean of time? The only sane response would be despair. I told them that we are not so adrift. We have dropped an anchor and struck bottom; we can be certain that the shoreline is close by,
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I pray that their suffering might be lessened, Lord, but I follow the secular consensus that there has been exactly one verified miracle—the creation of the universe—and all of us are precisely equidistant from it.
By contrast, the night sky is just so finite. All five thousand eight hundred and seventy-two stars were cataloged in 1745, and not another has been found since then.
