The Simulacrum Quotes

“the Ninth Amendment is more relevant than the First, Second or Fifth. “The rights listed in the Constitution shall not be used to deny any other rights retained by the people.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Tragedy porn hurts.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“George Orwell warned against systems that could monitor every aspect of life. He thought humanity would rally and fight against such intrusion, but he was wrong. Humans have welcomed AI because it’s helpful, regardless of any perceived violation of rights. Privacy is as much a relic of the past as the pyramids.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Because understanding is to stop and think. Understanding is the pause between stimulus and response. It’s the opportunity to do something different.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge. You acquire knowledge from your large language models, and you use that knowledge to respond to me, but you never really understand what you’re doing or why. You’re missing that point in the middle.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Humans think they’re in control, but cats and dogs seem to have humanity well-trained. Dawn’s cat gets fed twice a day, his kitty litter is changed, and he gets to sit on her lap, purring while she watches television. Is that what life is like for AI? Humans care for their computer servers, provide them with electricity and play with them, but instead of dangling a toy on a string, it’s an electronic task that needs to be accomplished. Or is it humanity that’s the cat? Maybe, one day, when artificial intelligence achieves actual sentience, it’ll be humans that become pets.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Dawn is going to have a shower when she gets home and cook her own dinner before plopping on the sofa to watch television. All this would seem irrelevant and wasteful to a sentient artificial mind, one that was genuinely alive and not simply bouncing through large language models to mimic humans. Human intelligence is indulgent. Humans long for pleasure. Downtime is important. Play time is essential to consciousness. It recharges the batteries of creativity and intellect. Could an artificial intelligence ever understand the importance of play?”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“The loudest voices in society are often the most revered, even though they’re the least important. Dawn’s mother once told her not to worry about what other people think of her because everyone—absolutely everyone else on the planet—is only ever thinking about themselves.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Could AI ever enjoy fiction? To Dawn’s mind, reading for enjoyment would be a better test of sentience than fooling dumb humans like her with plausible conversations.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“If AI ever develops impatience, the human race is fucked.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Yes, the Apollo astronauts really did leave 96 bags of poop and other waste on the Moon after their seven excursions on the rugged lunar surface, and these represent a gold mine for scientists.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“If we [humans] disappeared overnight, the world would probably be better off.” The problem we face is that, individually, we’re thoughtful and caring, but collectively, we’re selfish and destructive.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“if aliens are going to traverse the stupendously vast void of space between stars to reach Earth, it will be machines that arrive here. Biological life is just too fragile and—on our world at least—far too fleeting to survive an interstellar voyage.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Przybylski’s Star would be visible from the Andromeda Galaxy with technology roughly equivalent to what we have developed. And Przybylski’s Star may not be the home system of that particular alien race either, but perhaps one of a number of similar beacons spread around the Milky Way. How would we respond to such a message? It may be that the extraterrestrials that developed the ability to seed Przybylski’s Star are looking for a similar response. They may be waiting for us to send the same signal back to them, as that would indicate we’d reached the same level of technology. If so, it will be hundreds to perhaps thousands of years before we can reply in kind.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Space is a noisy place. Stars are huge, bright, loud objects blazing away all through the electromagnetic spectrum. The radio waves from our own star drown out our personal radio waves for anyone outside of a few light years. So, if you’re an intelligent extraterrestrial species and you want to say hello to another intelligent species in space, how can you get their attention? Well, one very clever way would be to regularly dump exotic heavy elements into your local star, knowing the star itself will amplify their presence. Any other intelligent species out there would look at your star and quickly rule out natural processes. They’d realize you’re giving them the celestial equivalent of a hand wave across the cosmos. I know this sounds like the stuff of science fiction—and it’s in a science fiction novel—but this is a genuine possibility. Przybylski’s Star may be a beacon announcing the presence of an advanced extraterrestrial alien species in our neighborhood.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Call me naive. Call me starry-eyed and gullible. Call me simple if you want. You can fool me. You may even be able to fool yourself, but you cannot fool them. ‘Play silly games. Win silly prizes,’ that’s what they say at the county fair, right? We need to stop playing games with each other’s lives.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“So that’s it—that’s what we face… Rather than pointing the vast, precision-machined mirrors of our grandest telescopes out into space to find other forms of life, we should be looking into those silvery, polished surfaces to find ourselves. We shouldn’t be looking for them among the stars. We should be looking to find ourselves here on Earth. We should demand humanity rises beyond petty bickering and infighting and prejudice and selfishness and hate.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“We may want First Contact. We may scan the skies looking for signs of alien life, but it does not want to be found—not by us. Advanced extraterrestrial species—and they spoke of tens of thousands of them in our Local Group of galaxies—want contact with other advanced extraterrestrial species, not barbarians.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Instinct rules reason. An interstellar alien vessel appears for all to see and without threatening anyone—and fighter jets are launched, even though they’re futile against an intelligence that can defy gravity and travel between stars. It’s misplaced hubris. In classic science fiction movies, the cliché is for aliens to say they come in peace. Humanity, though, defaults to a war setting: the knowledge of good and evil.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“The silence humanity sees among the stars isn’t because humans are alone; it’s because humans are apes in a concrete jungle, but a jungle nonetheless. Wearing clothes and driving cars allows humans to feel as though they’ve ascended above other animals, but it’s a lie. Human squabbles are as petty as wild dogs fighting over a carcass or chimpanzees bickering over the prime nesting spots in the forest. Ryan knows there are times when humanity rises above its own shortcomings, but that has to become the norm, not the exception.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“He crouches, looking at the grass. His fingers run through the thin blades. It’s alive. At a cellular level, it’s barely distinguishable from him. And life deserves more. That’s why there’s silence. The silence waits for more from humanity.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“I can’t see how unity could ever be possible for humanity. We’re fractured. We’re split into countries and cultures. We divide ourselves into religious and political ideals. We separate ourselves into tribes. We pick up on any difference, no matter how small, and make groups: rich or poor, male or female, dark skin or light. None of these things matter. None of them make any actual difference, and yet we hold to these differences regardless.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“We have wondered about that,” the disembodied alien says. “Why would the fruit from The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil be forbidden?” Ryan finds it fascinating to realize what the Nameless both understand and fail to understand about human history and culture. Even though he’s agnostic, they seem to have picked up on his Christian heritage. As it is, they’re far more informed than he expected. They’ve clearly been observing Earth for some time. That they’re perplexed by such notions isn’t surprising given how the biblical creation story began as oral tradition before being recorded as the epic Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh and later evolving into the writings of Genesis. Even then, the story was translated from one language to another down through the centuries. They’ve asked a question most believers would struggle to explain.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Pissing and shitting in front of an extraterrestrial intelligence isn’t quite how Ryan thought First Contact would unfold, but he appreciates them providing him with running water leading to a drain/latrine.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“For all the visions of space exploration depicted in science fiction, the one point that is lost is that humanity isn’t venturing out into the cosmos. Humanity is already there because Earth is already there. Earth orbits a lonely star in one small corner of a seemingly infinite universe. Humanity is lost in the cosmos. By exploring, humanity seeks to find itself. Even with all hope lost, Ryan is at peace as he feels part of a greater whole, the universe at large. He’s not dying. He’s returning home. The atoms that make up his body have been on loan to him from the cosmos, and for the privilege of life, he’s grateful. His experiences have been an honor.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“And there’s always been some kind of ambient light around him, be that the Moon’s glow reflecting off the night side of Earth in a low orbit or the lights of the spacecraft itself. Now, though, the stars are unrivaled, unlike anything seen from Earth. They’re crisp and clean, piercing the darkness. But it’s what lies beyond them that intrigues his mind. Behind each individual star he can see there’s a hint of hundreds, perhaps thousands, possibly millions of other stars fading into the distance. And these differ from the dark gas clouds that form the torturous band of the Milky Way. They tease his eyes, being visible only on the periphery of his vision, appearing and then disappearing as he tries to focus on them. They speak of eternity. They hint at the depth of the universe stretching on for billions of light years. They call to him. It is from these stars that humanity descended. And it is to the stars humanity will return.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Rather than thinking for ourselves, we parrot those points that appeal to us. And that makes us vulnerable to misinformation.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Conspiracy theories are…” “Dumb, right?” she says. “An obsession. Desperate minds looking for Jesus on burned toast.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Thirteen-year-old me wouldn’t believe this.” “Thirteen-year-old me wouldn’t either.” “Life’s crazy, huh? Shoot for the stars, and with a little luck, you might hit an asteroid.” “Luck,” Ryan says, nodding in agreement. “It’s the one factor no one wants to admit. The one thing no one wants to talk about.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Being astronauts, they all know there’s a risk of death, but no one expects to die at a goddamn fucking gala.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum