Ed

by qntm

"Will this hurt?" Ed thinks about this one for rather longer than I would have deemed necessary. "No," he concludes.

But think about what this means. Our universe is 1) open-source and 2) user-modifiable."

space is the first frontier. The first meaningful one. Everything up to today is child's play.

"Clarke once said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

"Um. This may sound like a stupid question. Do you come in peace?" "Not really, no."

Humility is an appropriate frame of mind in which to approach the infinite.

It's the rest of Humanity that's the problem. Take a look at our society, Sam, take a big step out of the picture you live in and look at it like they look at it, with objective eyes. What do you see? "I'll tell you what they see: horror. Hell. Chaos. War. Famine. People who are in power because they want power, not because they want to wield it for the better of others. Democratically voted leaders who can't conceive of a time beyond the end of their current term or a country other than their own. Bureaucratic, political insanity. Financial imbalance on an unimaginable, ungodly scale. It goes on.

The fact is that the future is now: we have the technology. We have medicine and solar power and... and books, and millimetre-thick television screens, and vaccines and contraception and education and technology that would boggle minds thirty years ago. We could have built that utopia decades ago, and Krah and all the rest see this as plain as day... and it's the fact that we haven't done it which sickens them.