Quotes from Peter Watts

The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact.

I think I'll call you Cygnus," Chelsea said. "The swan?" I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse. She shook her head. "Black hole. Cygnus X-1.

People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe.

Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes.

We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary.

Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded. Further predictions unreliable.

You can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

Everyone's running from something.

If you can see it, chances are it doesn't exist.

Everyone's got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn't noticed." He must have; the population had been dropping for decades.

Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort.

Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted.

I think I'll call you Cygnus," Chelsea said. "The swan?" I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse. She shook her head. "Black hole. Cygnus X-1." Ah. A dark, dense object that sucks up the light and destroys everything in its path. "Thanks a whole fucking lot.

from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.

Let's just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.

I don't understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

Why's a sticky word, though. It's not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as—as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it's not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.

At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there's gonna be wine in the mix at some point.

She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

Transcendence is transformation.

Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.

It's kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.