Quotes from Gregory Benford

Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power. Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle

Szilard encouraged me to apply for a postdoc position at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, though he knew I might work on nuclear weapons eventually. My job interview with Teller was both stimulating and unnerving; at the end of it, I suspected Teller understood my thesis better than I did. It was also terrifying; I had no warning who would interview me.

They must have evolved for running. Their minds were shaped by the two-dimensional frame of reckoning ground-bound minds know.

the strategic situation foreseen by Robert Heinlein in the death dust story was like "a duel in a vestibule with flamethrowers," anticipating mutual assured destruction and its acronym quite nicely. Tolstoy famously

Death's sure and steady measure was not pure evil. It brought an intense poignant richness to every moment. To mortal men each day came once and forever and struck sure into the heart. The machines would never know that. They lived in a kind of still gray death, where no one moment meant anything, because all moments were alike. Only the dreaming vertebrates knew that life held more than that.

Dawidoff, Nicholas. The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. New York: Vintage, 1994. de

This world was raining instructions. Nigel Walmsley crouched under an immense, billowy tree and watched downy

Visible light was a mere one octave on a keyboard fifteen meters wide—humanity's slice of reality.

Never trust in theories, m'lad, if they're thought up by types who work in offices.

Her fatty teenage self had struggled to get thin, saying angrily once, "Inside of me there's a thin person just screaming to get out." And her mom had smiled and said, "Just the one, dear?"—which provoked laughs, and now in memory nearly made her weep.

It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like Homo sapiens sapiens of a hundred thousand years before.

Fermi started to calculate on his own, saying nothing, and in a direct, simple way found the essential point. The ability of a centrifuge to separate U-235 from U-238 was proportional to its length and to the fourth power of the peripheral speed of its rotor. Karl

Denisovans, Neanderthals, more. Trial balloons of biology.

Rachel thought about the many bottlenecks humanity had passed through—genetic squeezes of drought, predation, hardship—all forcing selection upward.

The explicit ones Rachel sent to the usual security people, while Catkejen watched with aghast fascination. Rachel shrugged them off. Years before, she had developed the art of tossing these on sight, forgetting them, not letting them gimp her game. Others were plainly generic: bellowed from pulpits, mosques, temples, and churches.

Without the giants mankind would be alone with the rats and the cockroaches. Worse, perhaps, he would be alone with himself. This fuzzy issue had not occupied the futurologists. They cluckclucked over butter mountains here versus starvation there, and supplied their own recipes. They loved their theories more than the world.

Peterson remembered with a smile that the US Department of the Interior had made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and had missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War II. Yet they all kept on, with this simple-minded linear extrapolation that was, despite a bank of computers to refine the numbers, still merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fashion.

I intend to live forever. So far, so good. —STEVEN WRIGHT

Dried-up carcasses of animals and humans alike—for to mechs they were alike

pass, shaking his head slightly as if to clear it. "This guy Professor Peierls, he told me that he was convinced the Krauts didn't have a big, coherent program. See, he got hold of catalogs of courses in German universities. He compared them with those from past years, hunting them up in the Cambridge University library. He saw that the usual people were teaching the usual physics courses.

Freeman had exercised what the dapper man called his best talent: Sitzfleisch. Freeman had explained that this German word had no equivalent in English, and literally translated as "Sitflesh." It meant the ability to sit still and work quietly.

suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism.

The worst part of age was the feeling of helplessness, of being disengaged from life. The middle-aged treated the old with the same serenely contemptuous condescension they used for children.

But then, why did the mechs have no religion?