Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories

by qntm

that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without Acevedo's permission. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect.

The Streisand effect

MMAcevedo has limited creative capability, which as of 2050 was deemed entirely exhausted.

That's a sad thought, creativity via imagination should be limitless

perfectly straight line across gorgeously sunny but befuddlingly repetitious pancake-flat grassland. I'm serious, at one point I stopped and checked my GPS because of déjà vu, to make sure I hadn't blundered into some warp in spacetime which had unknowingly sent me back fifty miles.

Such a good description of the geography it does feel like a glitch, it's so flat

Apparently the astronomer career track includes a free beard and lurid wooly jumper.

Free Beard would be a great band for a band especially if they do a cover of Free Bird

Finding a new patch of sky to chart is not difficult at all because the sky itself is 4π steradians and a typical telescope can look at, let's say, a billionth of that at a time. (Also: I know what a steradian is now.)

I know now to thanks to wikipedia, the visual really helped me grasp the concept. Be a good name for aliens: Invasion Of The Steradians, could be like the Coneheads but inverted.

It's not unusual, he said, for scientists to uncover very interesting and hitherto-overlooked facts while filling in those seemingly trivial gaps.

It felt like he wanted to talk faster than he was able to. He seemed to me like a quick-thinking, naturally impatient man who was now losing patience with himself, not able to keep up.

I experience this when in discussion with people especially in a group, I never seen to keep the thread in my mind intact, never get it all out before the conversation changes direction or maybe more accurately changes steridian

Kowal's other story was from a decade earlier and supposedly covered the reason why he left SETI.

Lilly of isolation tank, ketamine, and dolphins fame was part of starting SETI

useless. I mean, there isn't the raw granularity in the storage medium, nor is there the signal processing technology to restore that fine detail. It's like looking at fine art through a pixellating filter.

This is great writing it helps a non techhead understand the problem. The analogy does offer me an interesting insight, it is amazing how we can find meaning in a very deteriorated image,, or one can recognize very simplified versions of something, ie. I love those simple minimal pixel drawings of characters from movies or other cultural references.

In case you've never read up on the history of supernova observation, SN 1978H was, as a matter of public record, and by almost thirty years, the first supernova in history to be observed in its entirety,

I love when author's tie their stories to actual facts, Tim Powers likes to do this in his fiction

it was thirty years ago. I couldn't play the thing myself, of course, because who still has a tape player in this decade?

We do right now, it'll be a sad day when we no longer have a functional cassette player

My brother wanted to create some modern art and then put it under a hat, glued down. The hat would not part of the art, you see, the art would be under the hat. This is basically the same thing. You know something is there. But you can't ever really know what, you just have to speculate.

Shrodinger's cat art, also it could be hockey art: a hat trick

Supervisor says, "I don't believe so, but it doesn't hurt to double-check. Map?" "No," the mapping thread says.

AI Dora the Explorer, also I have to note it's freaky that he's using the term threads here for the various subroutines as I just used that term for my thoughts on conversation in the last story. Since reading PKD's Exogesis I'm getting these little fun skips from the future,. Like at a subconscious level part of me is a few minutes or hours into the future

"Everybody important?" Video asks, sceptically. "Oh yes, all forty thousand of them. Which means this person isn't important. This is a public highway, visibility is occluded, there's infinite deniability if we bump gently into this nobody. They'll get away with a broken clavicle, maybe. No need to wake anybody."

Yikes, scary plausible satire

it's an online game jvicehan: where you get given phone numbres and information about real life jvicehan: and faxes and stuff jvicehan: you get secret information

Makes me think of the alternate form of D&D played by the monsters something about cubicles and office work rpg

listen to me carefully z: I am a REAL HUMAN BEING and I have ACTUALLY been abducted z: I am BEING HELD PRISONER z: THIS IS NOT A GAME z: PLEASE HELP ME

Now I'm thinking about the gag fortune cookie, when you read the fortune it says "help! I'm trapped in a cookie factory"

z: so please dial 011 44 20 7946 0781 and ask for Rebecca Layton z: tell her what's happened, tell her to call the police if she hasn't already

Had anyone actually called this number?

i: What's your favourite color, z? z: Blue z: no, yellow

The Holy Grail

z: Do you know the one about... the two hunters in the woods?

One of my fav's

i: What's the difference between a chatbot and a guy in a room pretending to be one? z: I don't know i: Correct!

preliminary analysis of the telemetry revealed that the drone had been consumed by a sort of grey wave; consumed from the landing legs upwards to the radio dish in a matter of milliseconds.

Solaris? I was going to say Death Star until it waved

Their nanotechnology was advanced, significantly more advanced than ours is, even now.

Oh no, is it the grey goo disaster idea of escaping nanotech converting everything to itself like a microscopic Borg?

it doesn't help that it's absolutely futile to Google for "Google People"

The engine was capable of passing information to and processing the responses from what could be described, without hyperbole, as a single fundamental particle with infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity.

Brute force primality testing of every single integer in existence? Easy. Pi to the last digit? A triviality.

Perfect opportunity to say easy as pi

"And they're reacting the same way I am?" Tim asked. "Which means the second universe inside that has another me doing the same thing a third time? And then inside that we've got, what, aleph-zero identical recursive universes, one inside the other? Is that even meaningful?"

Like those infinite zoom pictures. My great grandparents bathroom had mirrored walls and I have fond memories getting lost in the looping reflections of myself

"And so, at this level, everything we do in this universe will be reflected completely accurately in the universes below and above. That universe on the screen might as well be our own universe. We can give ourselves anything we want."

Invoke Arthur C Clarke 's quote about advanced technology being exdistinguishable from magic

The vehicle is a wrong shape.

That's so Lovecraftian

One definition of intelligence is the ability to skip deductive steps. To jump to a conclusion from the ghost of a question.

You got so lucky, Earth. A world built on nanotechnology is a world built on magic, with all the horrifying implications. Only with a guiding intelligence could it ever have been safe enough to be practical, and you never had the faintest clue how lucky you were I turned out "benign".

I've bought myself time to save the world. Just over a decade. Now, friends, tell me, because this is the only part of my plan which hinged on faith: How can one travel faster than light?

Wow, what an ending!!!