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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b368d9d | When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them--Io--is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 2f5fd51 | the cipher was based on the product of two hundred-digit prime numbers, and the National Security Agency had staked its reputation on the claim that the fastest computer in existence could not crack it before the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 44d7057 | Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on those planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation. But however far they travel from their native world, human beings can never escape the diurnal rhythm, set ages ago by its cycle of light and darkness. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| e424fe5 | The Ramans do everything in threes. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 12856a5 | Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 9aab1a9 | Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 4b61fbe | There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men's minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 7710f2d | The suggestion that the cores of the gas giants might consist of diamond was first made by Marvin Ross of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a classic paper "The ice layer in Uranus and Neptune--diamonds in the sky?" (Nature, Vol. 292, No. 5822, pp. 435-36, July 30, 1981.) Surprisingly, Ross did not extend his calculations to Jupiter." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| caaca9f | At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy." | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 52582d2 | The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials--these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 6563846 | Seems like it," answered Bowman. "The unit checks out perfectly. Even under two hundred percent overload, there's no fault prediction indicated." The two men were standing in the tiny workshop-cum-lab in the carrousel, which was more convenient than the space-pod garage for minor repairs and examinations. There was no danger, here, of meeting blobs of hot solder drifting down the breeze, or of completely losing small items of equipment that.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 502f006 | Miss Pringle was not much larger than the handheld personal assistants of his own age, and usually lived, like the Old West's Colt 45, in a quick-draw holster at his waist. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d7541cb | The sixth member of the crew cared for none of these things, for it was not human. It was the highly advanced HAL 9000 computer, the brain and nervous system of the ship. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| e1016e4 | For the last time, David Bowman slept. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 98d5d6e | Somehow, he was not in the least surprised, nor was he alarmed. On the contrary, he felt a sense of calm expectation, such as he had once known when the space medics had tested him with hallucinogenic drugs. The world around him was strange and wonderful, but there was nothing to fear. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 31c59ee | I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 71c16cd | The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| e12d4d2 | like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 2cd95ef | dying in an exciting situation is much better than living in a boring one. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| f560d05 | Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own? | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 426fff6 | Minkowski spacetime. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| cb6ce4e | It seemed to him that his ship was rather like a stranded whale that had managed a difficult birth in an alien element. He hoped that the new calf would survive. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 4cc6aad | There's nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that's available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges--absorbing but never creating. Di.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 5e8b058 | One day, somebody had predicted, Earth would have a ring like Saturn's, composed entirely of lost bolts, fasteners, and even tools that had escaped from careless orbital construction workers.) | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d4a6e1e | Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that's available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges--absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won'.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 6c9140b | had often been said that the only thing that could unite Mankind was a threat from space. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| aa03656 | Is there intelligent life on Earth? Yours, | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 524f0bb | She was certain that it was wise to prevent Wilson and Brown from working closely together during sorties inside Rama. Nicole chastised herself for not having raised the issue with Borzov on her own. She realized that her mission portfolio included mental health as well, but somehow she had difficulty thinking of herself as the crew psychiatrist. I avoid it because it's not an objective process, she thought. We have no sensors yet to measur.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 0c394ab | As a matter of interest," he said," | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| f0408db | Yet there was also something slightly spooky about them. Norton could never understand how men with advanced scientific and technical training could possibly believe some of the things he had heard Cosmo Christers state as incontrovertible fact. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 84fad86 | Hal's internal fault predictor could have made a mistake." "It's more" | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| b511ef4 | Nothing in this scene will be changed by my death, Nicole thought. There will just be one less pair of eyes to observe its splendor. And one less collection of chemicals risen to consciousness to wonder what it all means. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| b56e0e8 | harsh verdict of the great philosopher Lucretius: all religions were fundamentally immoral, because the superstitions they peddled wrought more evil than good. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d19d494 | Even a doomed man might reasonably be expected to take some slight interest in a few thousand square meters of gems. He | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| c68f2b1 | The eruption had hurled the thing out of its normal environment, deep down in the flaming atmosphere of the sun. It was a miracle that it had survived its journey through space; already it must be dying, as the forces that controlled its huge, invisible body lost their hold over the electrified gas which was the only substance it possessed. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 1d4b66e | Because Nature always balances her books, the Sun lost some velocity in the transaction; but the effect would not be measurable for a few thousand years. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 48783e2 | The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapor trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| d5534fd | Although Lucifer had accelerated the process, it has begun decades earlier, when the coming of the jet age had triggered and explosion of global tourism | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 35f3a79 | How foolish that expectation had been! He knew now that one might as well hope to see the wind, or speculate about the true shape of fire. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 1d479c4 | Yet if there were no hazards there would be no achievement, no sense of adventure. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| ae83d97 | The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time. | humor science science-fiction scifi space | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| e3acaf7 | Manual control, please." "Are you sure, Frank?" "Quite sure, 'Falcon' ... Thank you." Illogical though it seemed, most of the human race had found it impossible not to be polite to its artificial children, however simpleminded they might be. Whole volumes of psychology, as well as popular guides ('How Not to Hurt Your Computer's Feelings'; 'Artificial Intelligence -- Real Irritation' were some of the best-known titles) had been written on t.. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| c36ced0 | a man's beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others. | Arthur C. Clarke | ||
| 2830413 | The room you are about to enter," the Eagle said, setting up Nicole's wheelchair, "is the largest single room in this domain. It is half a kilometer across at its widest point. Inside currently is a model of the Milky Way Galaxy." | Arthur C. Clarke |