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the doghouse transformed into a Picasso dragonfly.
Simile
There’s no reliable way to precalculate the relative positions of the planets at the time the vehicle achieves orbit.
So we need clever, flexible software and a rugged, durable drive.
These organisms would function mainly as soil conditioners, meant to thrive as the aging sun warmed the Martian surface and released trapped water vapor and other gasses.
a million centuries for each of our years.
Where we would build, or allow evolution to build on our behalf, a race of saviors.
“It’s an act of teleological desperation.
Time is a useful lever. But the active ingredient is life.
I believe in that process: it’s robust, it’s stubborn.
Haha
hundreds of these raining out of a cloudless Martian sky, impregnating the sterile soil with human destiny.
E. D. Lawton
Medical advances
MS had been a curable (or containable) disease since the introduction of chemical sclerostatins ten years ago.
Haha
occasionally handing off contracts to dubious bidders in order to buy congressional support.
Haha does that really happen? Question
“A decade,” he said thoughtfully. “Or a billion years.
Medical ethics
“Physicians don’t bargain, Jase.” “Take it or leave it, Hippocrates.”
Haha
Haha - he didn’t even like pot.
Simile
I feel like a neon sign on an empty building.
Simile extended nice
the human species rendered as a finite event in the life of an ordinary star.
Why is the Spin barrier permeable to human artifacts like satellites, but not to meteors or even Brownlee particles?
the Hypotheticals want to keep us, or at least the terrestrial ecology, intact and alive,
“Maybe it’s not a prize. Maybe it’s a ransom. Pay up and we’ll leave you alone.”
suppose they hadn’t arrived when they did. What were we looking forward to?
A lot of people think we were facing our last century as a viable civilization, maybe even as a species. Global warming, overpopulation, the death of the seas, the loss of arable land, the proliferation of disease, the threat of nuclear or biological warfare…”
it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first.
When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you’re at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return.”
Haha
“They may be mining the sun,”
Obviously, what they’ve done to the Earth requires vast amounts of usable energy.
Mining the sun, Tyler! That’s an act of technological hubris almost as startling as the Spin itself.”
Diane.
Simon Tow...
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The price of piety is steeper now.”
Haha
Haha
this ridiculous fantasy of hers—”
“That E.D. is your father.
Haha - wow, that hit me by surprise!
Haha
She liked the idea of being blood kin to the Dupree family.”
That was the winter of the gantries.
Even this innocuous sentence takes on a chilling aura.
Simile extended
Simile extended
Hard science
Carol Lawton
There are some things a person takes for granted. For me it was having your mother in the house, keeping things in order, or just knowing she was nearby, there across the lawn.
Belinda Dupree,
First time we hear her first name. Not unusual since the narrator is her son.
her sudden sobriety. Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.
