Three Worlds Collide Quotes

“You've got to have an imagination to make it to the stars. The sort of species that wouldn't invent science fiction, probably wouldn't even invent the wheel -”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“I never understood the Prisoner's Dilemma until this day. Do you cooperate when you really do want the highest payoff? When it doesn't even seem fair for both of you to cooperate? When it seems right to defect even if the other player doesn't? That's the payoff matrix of the true Prisoner's Dilemma. But all the rest of the logic - everything about what happens if you both think that way, and both defect - is the same. Do we want to live in a universe of cooperation or defection?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“Unfortunately, I am also just now realizing that I've only been going along with society all my life, and that I never thought the matter through for myself, until now.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“It is time," said the Lord Pilot, "to see this calamity to its end." Spoken in Archaic English: the words uttered by Thomas Clarkson in 1785, at the beginning of the end of slavery. "I have set my will against this disaster; I will break it, or it will break me." Ira Howard in 2014. "I will not share my universe with this shadow," and that was the Lord Pilot, in an anger hotter than the nova's ashes. "Help me if you will, or step aside if you lack decisiveness; but do not make yourself my obstacle, or I will burn you down, and any that stand with you -”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“You do realize that your brain is literally hardwired to generate error signals when it sees other human-shaped objects stating a different opinion from yourself.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“Once upon a time," said the Kiritsugu, "there were people who dropped a U-235 fission bomb, on a place called Hiroshima. They killed perhaps seventy thousand people, and ended a war. And if the good and decent officer who pressed that button had needed to walk up to a man, a woman, a child, and slit their throats one at a time, he would have broken long before he killed seventy thousand people."

Someone made a choking noise, as if trying to cough out something that had suddenly lodged deep in their throat.

"But pressing a button is different," the Kiritsugu said. "You don't see the results, then. Stabbing someone with a knife has an impact on you. The first time, anyway. Shooting someone with a gun is easier. Being a few meters further away makes a surprising difference. Only needing to pull a trigger changes it a lot. As for pressing a button on a spaceship - that's the easiest of all. Then the part about 'fifteen billion' just gets flushed away. And more importantly - you think it was the right thing to do. The noble, the moral, the honorable thing to do. For the safety of your tribe. You're proud of it -”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“The most dangerous truth a Confessor knows is that the rules of society are just consensual hallucinations. Choosing to wake up from the dream means choosing to end your life.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“To die was not to leave the world, not to escape somewhere else; it was the simultaneous change of every piece of yourself into nothing.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“Human beings," said the Ship's Confessor, "cannot designate a 'current best candidate' without psychological consequences. Human rationalists learn to discuss an issue as thoroughly as possible before suggesting any solutions. For humans, solutions are sticky in a way that would require detailed cognitive science to explain. We would not be able to search freely through the solution space, but would be helplessly attracted toward the 'current best' point, once we named it. Also, any endorsement whatever of a solution that has negative moral features, will cause a human to feel shame - and 'best candidate' would feel like an endorsement. To avoid feeling that shame, humans must avoid saying which of two bad alternatives is better than the other.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“It's too hard, speaking to aliens. They don't think like you do, and you don't know what you're doing wrong."

"I wonder," the Master of Fandom said with artificial lightness, "if they'll call it 'xenofatigue' and forbid anyone to talk to an alien for longer than five minutes.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“I am not sure how to explain it, except that - truth matters to us.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“That was a lesson everyone (every human?) learned before puberty, not to let reality seem diminished by fiction. As the proverb went, It's bad enough comparing yourself to Isaac Newton without comparing yourself to Kimball Kinnison.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“I wasn't one of the dreamers, back then. I was just wrapped up in my private blanket of hurt.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“I am charged with guarding sanity, not morality. If you want to stay together, do not split. If you want peace, do not start wars. If you want to avoid genocide, do not wipe out an alien species. But if these are not your highest values, then you may well end up sacrificing them. What you are willing to trade off, may end up traded away - be you warned! But if that is acceptable to you, then so be it.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“One last time, Akon thought of all his fear, of the sick feeling in his stomach and the burning that was becoming a pain in his throat. He pinched himself on the arm, hard, very hard, and felt the warning signal telling him to stop.
Goodbye, Akon thought; and the tears began falling down his cheek, as though that one silent word had, for the very last time, broken his heart.

And he lived happily ever after.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“The screams failed to spread, as the strong hugged the weak and comforted them. That was something to be proud of, in the last moments of the old humanity.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“All three of our species have empathy, we have sympathy, we have a sense of fairness - the Babyeaters even tell stories like we do, they have art. Shouldn't that be enough? Wasn't that supposed to be enough? But all it does is put us into enough of the same reference frame that we can be horrible by each others' standards.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“I don't think we'll run short of volunteers to watch disgusting alien pornography. Just post it to the ship's 4chan, and check after a few hours to see if anything was modded up to +5 Insightful.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“Slowly, elaborately, Akon's head dropped to the table with a dull thud. "Why couldn't we have been alone in the universe?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“It was a fractal of ugliness, disgusting at every level of self-similarity.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide

“THIS VESSEL IS THE OPTIMISM OF THE CENTER OF THE VESSEL PERSON

YOU HAVE NOT KICKED US

THEREFORE YOU EAT BABIES

WHAT IS OURS IS YOURS, WHAT IS YOURS IS OURS”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Three Worlds Collide