Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories

Metadata

• Author: qntm
• Full Title: Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories
• Category: #books

Highlights

• This phenomenon has also been observed in other uploads created after MMAcevedo, and is now referred to as context drift. (Location 72)

New highlights added August 8, 2024 at 5:17 AM

• science is a tower which he and all other scientists are all trying to make taller. The lower levels are all filled in and sturdy, but the higher you go, the more gaps there are. The people right at the cutting edge looking for dark energy and Higgs bosons and symmetry violations are perched on the very top of the pile, hurling bricks into clear air to see what finds purchase. Meanwhile, Those Also Serve Who Stay Behind And Fill In The Gaps. They need filling. Trev called this janitorial science, because you're fixing up the incomplete job, the mess left behind by someone else. (Location 155)
• And Kowal said that eighty million, four hundred thousand plus or minus two hundred thousand years ago an intelligent species originating near a probable blue supergiant in NGC 3780 spent its expiring moments harnessing a substantial percentage of its parent star's power to broadcast an unknown message of indeterminate length to the entire listening universe, and we failed to record every last bit of it. (Location 208)
• The thing is that all art is a product of its context. That covers both social context and the literal container. It has to be this big. It has to be that heavy. It came in the form of a message. And what if you have just the context, and no art? Some things are implicit in all messages. Things like, "I was here." And "I sent this, on purpose." And "You are there, too." And "You received this. You are reading it." (Location 234)
• "Oh! Here. Use my heuristics." (Location 256)
• Nevertheless, the nanofungus blankets the planet. And if that means that it had to be intelligently guided at a planetary scale, there is a strong possibility that this was intentional suicide, at a civilisational level." (Location 492)
• "A billion years of ravening, intelligent hunger," (Location 508)
• There was hope that Sun could be reached and Humanity at large warned before the first slugs arrived in Human space. But who knew what a million-year-old planet-sized brain could do? Who knew how fast it could build its fastest messengers, now that it knew what space travel was? (Location 535)