Quotes About Technology

Life may seem pointless if we are fated to spend it staring stupidly at our ultra-intelligent progeny as they try to describe their ever more spectacular discoveries in baby-talk that we can understand.

In 2012, a few months after Planetary Resources unveiled its plan at a press conference, NASA announced the Robotic Asteroid Prospector project, which will analyze the feasibility of mining them. Then, in the fall of 2016, NASA launched a billion-dollar probe, called OSIRIS-REx, to meet Bennu, an asteroid measuring sixteen hundred feet across that will pass the Earth in 2135.

If each of them creates another thousand robots, then we have a million. Then a billion. Then a trillion. In just a few generations, we can have an expanding sphere containing quadrillions of these devices, which scientists call von Neumann machines.

These are examples of "transhumanism," which advocates embracing technology to enhance our skills and capabilities. To survive and even flourish on distant worlds, we may have to alter ourselves mechanically and biologically. To transhumanists, it's not a matter of choice but of necessity.

Most of the energy of a chemical rocket goes into lifting its own weight into space, but a nanoship passively receives its energy from external ground-based lasers, so there is no wasted fuel—100 percent of it goes into propelling the ship. And since nanoships do not have to generate their own energy, they have no moving parts. This significantly reduces the chances of mechanical breakdowns. They also have no explosive chemicals and would not blow up on the launchpad or in space.

It would take them only five seconds to zip to the moon, about an hour and a half to get to Mars, and a few days to reach Pluto. Rather than waiting ten years for a mission to the outer planets, we could receive new information about them from nanoships in a matter of days, and in this way we could observe the developments in the solar system very nearly in real time.

Also, antimatter is the most expensive form of matter in the world. At today's prices, a gram would go for about $70 trillion.

In 2016, the field of artificial intelligence was electrified by the news that AlphaGo, DeepMind's computer program, had beat Lee Sedol, the world champion of the ancient game of Go.

In 2013, the International Academy of Astronautics issued a 350-page report projecting that with enough funding and research, a space elevator capable of carrying multiple twenty-ton payloads might be possible by 2035. Price estimates usually range from $10 billion to $50 billion—a fraction of the $150 billion that went into the International Space Station.

The next level of digital immortality beyond the Library of Souls is the Human Connectome Project, an ambitious effort to digitize the entire human brain.

Blue Origin has produced its own rocket system, called New Shepard (named after Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space via a suborbital rocket).

the human eye can recognize the equivalent of about a million pixels, and a person needs at least 600 pixels to identify faces and familiar objects.)

When Louise Brown, the world's first test tube baby, was born in 1978, the technology that made it possible was denounced by many clergymen and columnists, who believed that we were playing God. Today there are more than five million test tube babies in the world; your spouse or best friend may be one.

The safety of user information stored in databases is often overlooked during the design of web applications.

This kiss is zeroes and ones jumbled and tossed into a pneumatic system, unscrambled at the end and scrawled onto a tape recorder slowly rolling at the side of your bed, then slapping back, reverbed off the ringer, a tinny phantom of the smooch like a smack on an aluminum can, up the same veins through the belly of the same satellite and softly to the side of my head;

I'm a hot-wired, heat-seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice-activated and biodegradable. I interface with my database, and my database is in cyberspace, so I'm interactive, I'm hyperactive, and from time to time I'm radioactive.

About the only valid definition (of science fiction) that I'm willing to accept is this: all of modern, mainstream, and realistic fiction is simply a branch, a category, or a subset of science fiction.

L'Homme a arrêté son évolution après avoir inventé la roue et l'air climatisé.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter in from the outside.

Kebisingan mobil yang hadir di mana-mana, seperti zat asam, melahap setiap momen perenungan. Mobil menjadikan keindahan masa lalu kota tak terlihat. Aku tidak seperti para moralis goblok yang berang karena sepuluh ribu kematian per tahun di jalan raya. Setidak-tidaknya, itu mengurangi jumlah pengendara mobil. Tapi aku memberontak terhadap kenyataan bahwa mobil-mobil telah menelan banyak katredal!

We owe a lot to Thomas Edison-if it wasn't for him, we'd be watching television by candlelight.

I'm not a technical person. It's not something I personally do love. I'm actually terrified of it, and that is what's interesting to me about it.

Though I carry enough electronics to get nervous in a lightning storm, I love paper and I always have a Moleskine journal with me to capture notes, conversations and ideas.