Quotes from Peter Watts

Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.

And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality .

Word of advice," the Colonel said from the other side. "Don't tease the zombies.

Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot.

And 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.

Lenie " odzywa siÄ™ Joel "SÅ'ucham?" "PróbowaÅ'aÅ› siÄ™ kiedyÅ› zabi??" "Jasne, jak ka?dy" odpowiada

You give up a lot when you don't trust the EM spectrum.

And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it's only dark when the lights are on.

WHY SHOULD MAN EXPECT HIS PRAYER FOR MERCY TO BE HEARD BY WHAT IS ABOVE HIM WHEN HE SHOWS NO MERCY TO WHAT IS UNDER HIM? —Pierre Troubetzkoy

TO TRAVEL HOPEFULLY IS A BETTER THING THAN TO ARRIVE. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

So there's a membrane of—of living tissue around that star," I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. "A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star.

Digital physics had reigned supreme since before he'd been born, and its dictums were as incontrovertible as they were absurd. Numbers didn't just describe reality; numbers were reality, discrete step functions smoothing up across the Planck length into an illusion of substance.

Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions

She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There's a reason fuckcubbies don't come with fluorescent lights.

The static's nice. I could do without the screeching." "Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful . Like old jazz.

And believe it or not, those screaming faces Sarasti used near the end of the book represent a very real form of statistical analysis: Chernoff faces,132 which are more effective than the usual graphs and statistical tables at conveying the essential characteristics of a data set.133

What do you do when you've finally resigned yourself to your own inevitable extermination, and someone offers you a way out? Any hope in a place like this almost has to be false; all it can do is shake your determination, tempt you with thoughts of after this is over when you should just be thinking about getting the job done now. Hope is distraction, hope is fear undercutting resolve, because hope gives you back that most terrible of battlefield commodities: something to lose.

So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better.

Dan, you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You're already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.

There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn't diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.)

nouveaux undead

It turns out the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind114. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: "At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it."115

So many things constrain us, from so many directions.