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8b4b5c1
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Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work-- no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the syste..
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institutions
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e6f41aa
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The real locals were like fish in water, unaware and unimpressed.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fef24f7
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You died to teach me that I was wrong -- that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would never stop spreading in men who had guns. Until all the people like Butterfly, who lived in peace without guns, were dead, murdered by us. And then only men with guns would be left, and they would murder each other too, as fast as they could in ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0ab07c4
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My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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406db30
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here's the genuine thoughtfulness and deep consideration for sake of truth and meaningful understanding. There's the recognition that if there were simple answers, we'd have already implemented simple solutions - and that not being the case, people have to work hard to discover the best - imperfect but with iteration ever-less flawed - courses of action and forget the pedantic and simple-minded debate points that so often mar discussions th..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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850e366
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the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition--the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black s..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5f523f2
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He says, "We are visitors on this planet. We are here for ninety or one hundred years at the very most. During that period, we must try to do something good, something useful, with our lives. Try to be at peace with yourself, and help others share that peace. If you contribute to other people's happiness, you will find the true goal, the true meaning of life."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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69e457a
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Existence is the experiment itself.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1fd3206
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It's like being Calvin and watching Hobbes turn back into a stuffed doll.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7d6f715
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Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9d2a6ee
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People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4d038b5
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But long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f2d12dd
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It was winter here, as if they were in Patagonia or New Zealand, and the light from the sunspot on the sunline smeared so that shadows blurred at the edges, and the air looked rusty.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fa089b6
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That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant, to people around Saturn and on Earth in particular.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a1b6fc8
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She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted everything; but she could not make it whole or coherent.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5456e7a
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Meaning, Wahram thought, that right now somewhere in the system there could be machines in human form, escaped into the crowd, doing their best to stay free, perhaps, when any X-ray machine or other surveillance device would reveal what they were--out there hiding, trying to accomplish the goals they had been given, perhaps, or new ones they might choose for themselves, according to some self-invented algorithm of survival. Damaged, dangero..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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94b8088
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And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore t..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cd6a99f
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I believe the twenty-first century can become the most important century of human history. I think a new reality is emerging. Whether this view is realistic or not, there is no harm in making an effort." --The Dalai Lama,"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e7e64fb
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This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers," Vlad said. "Robber barons are not really very efficient."
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robber-barons
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a03876a
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We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5dbb4a8
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I don't know how I'll be as a shaman. I'll find out when I try it. You both know me. You've known me since before we even had names. I can't travel in my dreams, or above the sky. There aren't any spirits that talk to me or through me. I can't sing the songs. I can't help people who are sick. But I'll tell you this, and he raised his right forefinger before them and seized them with his eyes: --I can paint that fucking cave.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ae40089
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Genius is not a matter of intelligence, but of spirit; and we cannot speak accurately of the spirit in any language but music.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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a91a0d5
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He had written commentaries for the Journal suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had. Not that they should starve themselves from time to time, or needed to kill all the meat they ate--just that incorporating more paleolithic behaviors might increase health and well-being. After all, a fairly well-identified set of behaviors, repeated for many generations, had changed their ancestors ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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dcab7ca
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a collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted files and rasps and planes, a crescent-wrench set, a crimper, five hammers, some hemostats, three hydraulic jacks, a bellows, several sets of screwdrivers, drills and bits, a portable compressed gas cylinder, a box of plastic explosives and shape ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cf4d6bd
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Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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0bf79af
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So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun--and then--these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again.
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powerful
science-fiction
space
space-exploration
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c0f3386
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The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him, of running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1d298a7
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Scared of her, solicitous of her, in love with her--she had seen all that. And shouting at her furiously for some small treachery, or for nothing at all; she had certainly seen that too. Because he had loved her.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6232f62
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Then it's a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes, and trying any old thing, including the engineer's solution, which is to hit things with a hammer.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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31001fa
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Now as Daly said, man-made capital and natural capital are not substitutable. This is obvious, but since most economists say they are substitutable, it has to be insisted on. Put simply, you can't substitute more sawmills for fewer forests. If you're building a house you can juggle the number of power saws and carpenters, which means they're substitutable, but you can't build it with half the amount of lumber, no matter how many saws or car..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e78483d
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The door opened to reveal something like the opposite of Inspector Genette: a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos--toad, newt, frog--even the very words were ugly.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5422f11
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Dent recognized it; the intermezzo before the last movement of De Bruik's Human Biology. The finale of the symphony was a standard concert opener in the outer worlds. Soon the crackling of superamplified muscle contractions and the rush of adrenaline into the bloodstream announced the shift to the finale, and the crowd cheered wildly; Dent could feel his blood surging through him--
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c346273
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The town was made of cubical buildings with steep roofs, each one painted a bright primary color that through the long winters was said to be cheering.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f2e2f3e
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So you attempt what De Bruik attempted, in her Free Radical Binds to Macromolecule." "We all attempt what De Bruik attempted, in one way or another." In Free Radical De Bruik had represented the macromolecule, an RNA strand, as a passacaglia, a ground base repeated again and again, in patterns of four that alternated regularly. This was a simple icon, a metaphor in which the repeated ground base stood for the repeated proteins in the RNA; f..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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4c1bb81
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But it is an orchestra," I say. "It's an imitation orchestra--an orchestrion, an orchestrina--whatever you call it, it does a terrible job! All you've done is turn a sublime group achievement, a human act, into an inferior egotistical solo--"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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cfe40fb
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We are all alone in our own life-world, flying through the universe at great speed. Humans are lucky not to face that. If they don't.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c8591fb
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Spontaneous storms, and changes in color that were not tied to changes in wind speeds, and fractal borders, bounded infinities scrolling inside each other. We were looking at a mind thinking. A mind feeling. The woodwind glissando of the whale's cry.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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79ab315
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indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and so on and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in that sense they were all madmen.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1019379
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And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard pro..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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925111f
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And with our work," John continued, "we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story"--i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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b510f3f
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Maybe the proper response to standing on the side of a planet, in the open air of its atmosphere, very near to the local star, is always terror. Maybe everything humans ever did or planned to do was designed to dodge that terror. Maybe their plan to go to the stars was just one more expression of that terror.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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62655d6
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After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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eb926c8
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The world is like a tree, from every leaf you can work back to the roots.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ebe4e5e
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Sellers offer stuff, buyers buy it, and in the flux of supply and demand the price gets determined. It's crowdsourced, it's democratic, it's capitalism, it's the market.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |