Quotes About Progress

We gotta terraform Earth before we get distracted by Mars

The end state of all this would be a Dyson sphere:

Anyway, she was now the sort of girl who shot people. Useful to know.

Neal Stephenson

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it.

Ideas are good things to have even if they are old. Even to understand the most advanced theorics requires a lifetime of study. To keep the existing stock of ideas alive requires…all of this." And I waved my arm around at the concent spread out below us.

When he came to his senses, he was aware that a large number of telephones were singing their little electronic songs. Including his. The birth cry of a new age.

Neal Stephenson

Much later, humans might rouse themselves to take action and be agents once again. But now and for long into the future they would be nothing more than patients.

Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds.

Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow, and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth," T.R. said, "it wouldn't undo what we've done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.

All change happens because one man wants something different.

summary to me. I thought you couldn't summarize.

He remained in engineering and did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year

The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream.

Where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruin.

We are technocrats. We make decisions like engineers. Which doesn't always line up with what people imagine they want.

None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts.

Your mistake, Ng says, is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms -- like me -- are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before.

if Newton is the finger, Leibniz is the stone, and they press against each other with equal and opposite force, a little bit harder every day. RAVENSCAR:

That's the thing about space," she said. "So many smart people are so interested in it that it's difficult to come up with a really new idea.

And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society.

Suppose all of that comes to pass, Sophia, and you get that job and embark on that career. Twenty years from now, how will you know if you have succeeded?

In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space.