Cody Conroy

“and Catelyn Stark stepped up behind him and opened his throat. The horseman remembered an urgent engagement elsewhere and galloped off suddenly.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“What about the related matter of whether we are capable of creating intelligences smarter than ourselves? Computers routinely do mathematics that no unaided human can manage, outperform world champions in checkers and grand masters in chess, speak and understand English and other languages, write presentable short stories and musical compositions, learn from their mistakes, and competently pilot ships, airplanes, and spacecraft. Their abilities steadily improve. They’re getting smaller, faster, and cheaper. Each year, the tide of scientific advance laps a little further ashore on the island of human intellectual uniqueness with its embattled castaways. If, at so early a stage in our technological evolution, we have been able to go so far in creating intelligence out of silicon and metal, what will be possible in the following decades and centuries? What happens when smart machines are able to manufacture smarter machines?”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Our guess is that machines capable enough to be useful interstellar explorers are necessarily so complex as to be vulnerable to mutation in their programs,” Dayan said. “They need not visit a nova. Sooner or later, if nothing else, cosmic radiation will do it. Generally, they lose their ‘wits’ and just drift on aimlessly forever. Probably no line of von Neumanns gets beyond a few hundred light-years before it goes effectively extinct.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“You cannot go back into the past and change what has happened, no matter what you do. But your actions can be a part of what did happen.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers