The Freeze-Frame Revolution Quotes

“You might just decide that one life lived on your own recognizance is better than a million unremembered births.”
― Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“Black holes are the ultimate garbage can.”
― Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“Don't feel too bad. Everyone's in chains here. Eriophora's a slave ship. We cavemen are shackled by our need for air and food and water, by the disorienting discontinuity of lives cut into slices spread centuries apart. The Chimp is shackled by its own stupidity, And you, well...”
― Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“We're dead anyway, all we get to choose is the exit strategy.”
― Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“if you’re smart enough to do the job, you’re too smart to trust with the controls.”
― Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“Nothing's immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups' backups' backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware.”
― Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“I'll kill you if I can."

"I'll save you," it said. "If you let me.”
― Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“I do cry now and then, in case you're wondering. I even cried for Chimp once. I was there for his birth, years before we ever shipped out. I saw the lights come on, listened as he found his voice, watched him learn to tell Sunday from Kai from Ishmael. He was such a fast learner, such an eager one; back then, barely out of my own accelerated adolescence and not yet bound for the stars, I felt sure he'd streak straight into godhood while we stood mired in flesh and blood. He seemed so happy, devoured every benchmark, met every challenge, anticipated each new one with a kind of hardwired enthusiasm I could only describe as voracious.”
― Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“when a lemur makes a human, it doesn’t matter how many lemur chains and lemur rules and lemur constraints she imposes. She’s simply, computationally incapable of seeing all the angles that her smarter creation can take in at a glance.”
― Peter Watts, The Freeze-Frame Revolution