Starfarers Quotes

“In the intricate and mutable space-time geometry at the black hole, in-falling matter and energy interacted with the virtualities of the vacuum in ways unknown to the flatter cosmos beyond it. Quasi-stable quantum states appeared, linked according to Schrodinger's wave functions and their own entanglement, more and more of them, intricacy compounding until it amounted to a set of codes. The uncertainty principle wrought mutations; variants perished or flourished; forms competed, cooperated, merged, divided, interacted; the patterns multiplied and diversified; at last, along one fork on a branch of the life tree, thought budded.
That life was not organic, animal and vegetable and lesser kingdoms, growing, breathing, drinking, eating, breeding, hunting, hiding; it kindled no fires and wielded no tools; from the beginning, it was a kind of oneness. An original unity differentiated itself into countless avatars, like waves on a sea. They arose and lived individually, coalesced when they chose by twos or threes or multitudes, reemerged as other than they had been, gave themselves and their experiences back to the underlying whole. Evolution, history, lives eerily resembled memes in organic minds.
Yet quantum life was not a series of shifting abstractions. Like the organic, it was in and of its environment. It acted to alter its quantum states and those around it: action that manifested itself as electronic, photonic, and nuclear events. Its domain was no more shadowy to it than ours is to us. It strove, it failed, it achieved. They were never sure aboardEnvoy whether they could suppose it loved, hated, yearned, mourned, rejoiced. The gap between was too wide for any language to bridge. Nevertheless they were convinced that it knew something they might as well call emotion, and that that included wondering.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“Oh yes,” the girl said, with an uneven little”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“Several of Hawking’s contemporaries, Kerr, Thorne, Tipler,”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“No surprise,” Nansen said needlessly. “They were bound to notice us.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“It doesn’t seem reasonable to me that something so superbly organized, its law reaching down beneath the atom, out beyond the quasars, through all of time, that it would throw up something as rich as life and intelligence by chance.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“He knew that was not quite orthodox, but he had been influenced by a largely European education.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“Evening light slanted long above the roofs of Cairo. The call to prayer rang from minarets that it touched with gold.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“You could share sports, games, recorded shows of every kind; you could pursue hobbies, studies, even research; you could teach two or three interested shipmates something you were knowledgeable about, such as a skill or a language; you could help arrange live entertainment, a play or a concert or whatever; you could think about questions that were not trivial but for which there had always somehow been too many distractions; you could simply talk with someone, long conversations, perhaps over a drink or two, and get to know that person better.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers

“Yeah, it was fun at first, the novelty, the jobs, and then travelling around, but what are now except tourists once in a while when his high and mightiness Nansen lets us go?”
― 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

“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

“The fact that there are countless things we will never know, and many that we could not possibly know, does not mean they do not exist—only that we cannot prove it.”
― Poul Anderson, Starfarers