Termination Shock

by Neal Stephenson

Too vague! Too much diffusion of responsibility. Too much politics.”

“In my experience, people all over the world think the same way,” Willem said. “If there is a disaster, it means that whoever is in power has lost the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ and must be gotten rid of.”

“They used to call it ‘Hellhole on the Brazos,’ but Sugar Land sounds like a sweeter investment.” “Why was it a hellhole?” “Built by convict labor. Legal slavery, after the Civil War. Sugar plantations are so bad, you almost couldn’t have sugar without slaves.”

It was like any other meeting, be it of European Union bureaucrats in Brussels or members of the Dutch royal household, which was to say that it was at least as much about social dominance and hierarchy as about boats and trucks.

Comanches were a movement, not a race. There were white Comanches, Mexican Comanches, Black ones, ones who used to be Caddo or Cheyenne or what have you.”

“A hundred and twenty-five billion,” T.R. said. “That was the price tag for Harvey. Second only to Katrina, which was a hundred and sixty-one. So that’s what kind of money we’re talking. Damages on the order of one or two hundred billion, inflicted on this city suddenly and at unpredictable times.”

“He did not understand—none of these people did—that this is stochastic land on the edge of a stochastic reservoir. They didn’t understand it because those are statistical concepts. People can’t think statistically. People are hardwired to think in terms of narratives.

In it was a kind of droll sarcasm at the very idea that there was such a thing as sea level in any useful sense. He saw it all stochastically and wouldn’t be caught dead speaking of sea level with a straight face.

We gotta terraform Earth before we get distracted by Mars is my philosophy.”

The physics of it is beyond me, but they say that the maximum velocity of the projectile can’t be any faster than the speed of sound in the gas that is doing the pushing. The speed of sound in light gases like hydrogen and helium is higher than that in air.

provided the basis for decades of research and modeling of so-called solar geoengineering—the term for any climate mitigation scheme that was based on bouncing part of the sun’s rays back into space.

No doubt it had already been debated at exhausting length in the comments thread dangling from the end of this video like a string of fecal material from a yak’s ass hairs.

The next morning the Fellowship, now filled out to a Tolkien-compliant head count of nine, simply walked the ten kilometers down the valley to the northern terminus of the tunnel.

Because then we know that there is intelligence—active intelligent minds—right there on the ground.”

Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.

So he could see that Michiel was basically calling the shots but had delegated the management to the woman. Michiel could be the informal nice guy who smiled and made witty comments, but the woman had to be all reserved and serious to prevent the whole thing from turning into a frat party.

Alastair had somehow acquired the rock and kept it “as a memento mori” to focus the minds of shipping company executives who wanted to know (a) why insurance was so

expensive and (b) why enormous ships sometimes ceased to exist without warning or explanation.

You can’t predict this sort of thing, sadly, but doing the postmortem is easy. Like you can’t predict a car crash but it’s easy to reconstruct it from skid marks.”

awed, staggered, and even a little humiliated by the sheer scale at which the oil and mining industries operated—year in, year out, in a way that was basically invisible to the people on the other side of the world who benefited from what they were doing, and who funded these works, every time they checked their Twitter.

But maybe you overrate the value of discussing things. There is a reason why I don’t hire a lot of Ph.D.s. I have a Ph.D., Dr. Castelein. I seen how the sausage is made. And the problem with Ph.D.-havers is overthinking. Y’all live in this alternate universe where everything has to be made perfect sense of before y’all can do anything.

Sometimes, when a lot happened at once, time got compressed, or something, and then it had to relax to bring the universe back into balance.

And what he saw there was testimony to the power of something that Rufus had never really got the hang of: working in a coordinated fashion with other human beings. In his personal experience, this had always been pure foolishness, because you had to get them to do what you wanted them to do. And getting other people to do what you wanted them to do had, for Rufus, always been a sort of black art. Not worth the trouble of learning. In the army, they had people for that. Whole echelons of people. But these three women might as well have been of a different species. Working quietly and assiduously while he’d been busy with his soldering iron, they had simply got it all done.

Because that seemed to be the timeless doom of fierce independent-minded tribespeople. The world just didn’t fucking like them. And if you were too disorderly for too long, and it started to cause problems for people, then order was going to be imposed.

“You can’t just admit you need me and pretend that makes a difference,” Saskia said. “You have to listen.”