Tomorrowland Quotes

“Nuclear fusion, the energy released when two atoms collide, is gods’ fire, both the fuel that powers the stars and the all-star light in “Let there be light.” Nuclear fission, meanwhile, is the energy released when an atom is subdivided. It”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“The point at which someone goes into REM is a fantastic indicator of depressive tendencies,”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“As it turns out, broad vistas also broaden attention. When you see into the distance, literally, you see into the distance, figuratively. That's why time in nature is so tightly coupled to creative insights. That time acts as an incubation period. And nature tells the ACC [anterior cingulate cortex] to start considering farther flung possibilities. And since nature also has significant mood boosting effects, this further amplifies the ACC's ability to find those far flung connections, and further enhances creativity. Along similar lines, being in small cramped spaces has the opposite effect. It shrinks attention, getting us to focus on the parts, and not the whole. So in practical terms, crawl out from under your desk, go outside, look around, repeat, as needed.”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“The point at which someone goes into REM is a fantastic indicator of depressive tendencies,” said Britton. “We’ve gotten very good at this kind of research. If you took 100 people and did a sleep study, we can look at the data and know, by looking at the time they entered REM, who’s going to become depressed in the next year and who isn’t.” Normal people enter REM at 90 minutes. Depressed people enter at 60 minutes or sooner. It works the same in the other direction. Happy people go into REM around 100 minutes. Britton found that the vast majority of her near-death group entered REM sleep at 110 minutes — a rating that is nearly off-the-charts for overall life-satisfaction and a neurophysiological correlate that supports the anecdotal evidence that these strange states are literally and completely transformative.”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“The Everglades are dying. Nearly half of their 4 million acres have been swallowed up by sprawl and sugarcane. Almost 70 plant and animal species that reside there hover on the brink of extinction. The wading bird populations — egrets and herons and spoonbills and the like — have declined a staggering 90 percent. The saw grass prairies, for which the region is famous, have grown smaller with each passing year, and the once legendary game fish populations aren’t doing much better. Among the few fish that do remain, scientists have detected enough mercury in their fatty tissue to open a thermometer factory.”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“The story told in this chapter is one example: an attempt to rebuild the Everglades, the world’s largest saw-grass prairie, once a free-flowing wonder, now a devastated mess. This effort is the largest and most expensive public works project ever undertaken. It also marks our first attempt at terraforming, our once sci-fi term for the sculpting of worlds, and both a testament to the incredible scale at which our species can now play and, perhaps, the incredible hubris it takes to play at this scale.”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It’s the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger’s device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories — for example, learning to play scales — then translates them into digital signals.”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“With this in mind, it is not inconceivable to say that there are people alive today who will live long enough to see their selves stored in silicon and thus, by extension, see themselves live forever.”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“It’s time to abandon the Greek idea that hubris is bad and face a simple fact — hubris is what the cosmos seems to want from us.”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

“It was early spring of 1997, about five years into my career as a journalist, a day of dark skies and cold rain. Peter Diamandis and I had gotten together for the very first time at a rundown diner on the outskirts of Chinatown, San Francisco. The diner was long and narrow, and we were seated toward the rear of the room. I was sitting with my back to the building’s far corner, Peter with his back to the rest of the restaurant. And the rest of the restaurant was staring at him. For twenty minutes, Peter had been getting more and more excited while telling me about his newly launched endeavor: the XPRIZE, a ten-million-dollar competition for the first team to build a private spaceship capable of taking three people into space twice in two weeks. Already, the Sharpie had come out. There were charts on napkins, graphs on placemats, a healthy rearrangement of condiments — the ketchup marking the end of the troposphere, the mustard the beginning of the mesosphere. About the time he got loud about how some maverick innovator working out of a garage somewhere was going to “take down NASA,” people began to stare. Peter couldn’t see them; I could. Twenty folks in the restaurant, all looking at him like he was stark raving mad. And I remember this: I remember thinking they were wrong. It’s hard to put my finger on why. Part of it was a strange hunch. Journalists tend to be cynical by nature and disbelieving by necessity. The job requires a fairly healthy bullshit detector, and that was the thing — mine wasn’t going off. More of it was that I had just come from a month in the Black Rock Desert, outside of Gerlach, Nevada, watching Craig Breedlove try to drive a car through the sound barrier. Breedlove’s effort was terrestrial-bound rocket science, for sure. The Spirit of America, his vehicle, was pretty much a miniature Saturn V — 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, 6 feet high, and powered by a turbojet engine that burned, well, rocket fuel. During those long days in the desert, I spent a lot of time talking to aerospace engineers. They all made one thing clear: Driving a car through the sound barrier was a lot harder than sending a rocket ship into low-earth orbit. In fact, when I asked Breedlove’s crew chief, former Air Force pilot turned aerospace engineer Dezso Molnar — who we’ll meet again later as the inventor of the world’s first flying motorcycle — what he was going to work on when all this was over, he said, “I want to do something easy, something relaxing. I think I’m going to build a spaceship.”
― Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact