Quotes from Douglas E. Richards

Major Tom. Shouldn't you be calling ground control or something?

In 1945, the Russians had laid siege to Berlin, and Hitler had been found dead inside an underground command center at his Berlin headquarters, having taken his own life.

If your ancestors heard the rustle of a friendly breeze far away in the tall grass, and ran away, mistaking the breeze for a lion, this cost them very little. But if they heard the rustle of a lion in the tall grass, and mistook it for a friendly breeze, this would cost them their lives. Seeing potential bad news behind every harmless breeze is a survival instinct.

Then we don't deserve to be preserved,

monogamous," said Osborne with a smile. "A good quality in an alien AI.

How many times had politicians, elected solely on charisma and domestic policy expertise, made tragic blunders, totally avoidable tragic blunders, leaving the soldiers in the field to twist in the winds of political expediency? Spilling

talked to himself under his breath fairly frequently, and often couldn't remember where he had left stuff, as though his mind was too powerful to dwell on the mundane.

Humanity was composed of separate individuals now, but an embryo at early stages was also nothing more than a ball of separate cells. But these separate cells would ultimately become connected in wondrous ways to create something unimaginably greater than themselves.

Who are you?" he whispered.

Then said the brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate, "To every man upon this earth, Death cometh soon or late. And how can a man die better Than facing fearful odds. For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods.

I had taken German in high school, and I was truly horrible at it.

And what happened when an individual cell became selfish and exhibited Nietzsche's will to power? It became a cancer. The cell would break free of the restraints on its own division and become immortal—for a while—until its very immortality choked the entire organism to death, killing the selfish cell in the process.

No one in that room had deserved death. He

Because we aren't wired for utopia. Evolution didn't drive us to the top of the food chain by allowing us to be content. Human evolution favors anxiety over happiness. Happiness dulls our sharpness. Anxiety, on the other hand, ensures we maximize our attention to possible threats to our survival.

If an observer could alter the universe by his observation, then didn't the universe require consciousness to even exist?

how maddeningly cryptic the AI can be.

That is right. Some of your human religious philosophers have conjectured that the need for external stimulation is the very reason God created the universe, and humanity, in the first place. To have a purpose. To combat loneliness. To ensure there is something that exists outside of itself.

rocket-propelled suppository

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics, we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it." ?—David Deutsch (Oxford physicist who laid the foundations for quantum computing)

I'm just struck by how absolutely certain we can be about things for which there is no objective certainty. How stubborn. And how often we can fool ourselves.

She really did believe that when all was said and done, only experience with a person could give you a sense of their spirit—their values, their dreams, their demeanor, and their sense of humor.

You're about to drink wine that didn't come out of a box, remarkable. Possible Nobel Prize remarkable. I haven't begun to determine if there are any real-world applications, but on theoretical grounds this could be a huge breakthrough.

We seek to better ourselves, and to be accepting of other cultures. But the result is often that we're hypersensitive to the slightest hint of injustice in our own country, while ignoring appalling abuses in others. Many of us even hold these other countries up as shining examples, when the opposite is true.

As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had famously expressed, "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.