Quotes from Michael Crichton

Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways—air, and water, and land—because of ungovernable science.

Multi-XMP? You mean more than one Cray?

drinking a Coke and laughing, waving the camera away. "That's the couple," Watanabe said. "Grace and Bobby

Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.

Saben lo que están haciendo. Hay máquinas por doquier. Antes servían al hombre, pero ahora empiezan a dominarle. Muy sutilmente, pero pronto lo lograrán. -Harry Benson-

Attractions so astonishing they would capture the imagination of the entire world.

Because raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place.

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren't saints, they're human beings, and they do what human beings do—lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance, and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That's human nature. It isn't going to change.

But then, things never turn out the way you think they will.

In New Guinea, they had a disease called kuru, transmitted by eating the brains of their enemies." "That's not true." "Gajdusek won a Nobel Prize for it. They were eating brains, all right.

But you must admit, these are nontrivial issues. We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn't it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.

En general, el promedio de vida de una especie era de cuatro millones de años. En el caso de los mamíferos se reducía a un millón de años. Transcurrido ese tiempo la especie desaparecía.

What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told—and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.

The essence of verification is multiple lines of reasoning that converge at a single point.

And finally, as if to emphasize their emergence from academia into the world, they dressed and spoke with what one senior mathematician called "a deplorable excess of personality.

Would you just check him? I'm pretty sure he's dead." "How do you know?" "He jumped from the twelfth floor. Would you just check him, make sure he's dead?

Unable to construct genuine nanoassemblers, Xymos was using bacteria to crank out their molecules. This was genetic engineering, not nanotechnology.

Los seres humanos acumulan información errónea, así que es difícil saber a quién creerle. Entiendo cómo te sientes.

Montaigne said three hundred years ago, 'Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.

Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports.

Si una cosa va mal, tiende a seguir mal. Eso se refleja en el dicho popular que afirma que las desgracias nunca vienen solas. La teoría de la complejidad revela que el dicho popular es acertado. Las desgracias se agrupan. Las cosas siempre van de mal en peor. Ése es el mundo real.

that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest;

I believe my life has value, and I don't want to waste it thinking about clothing

And in 1998, quantum teleportation was demonstrated in three laboratories around the world—in Innsbruck, in Rome and at Cal Tech.3 Physicist Jeff Kimble, leader of the Cal Tech team, said that quantum teleportation could be applied to solid objects: