Alpha Centauri Quotes

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.

From Alpha Centauri, we were twin stars, side by side.

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged. ...In these enlightened days, of course, no one believes a word of it.

Today, we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos because we're human, and our nature is to fly.

And like a good neighbor, Alpha Centauri is there.” Touched by an Alien

Viewed from my bed, he was a distant constellation. From Alpha Centauri, we were twin stars, side by side.

It’s pretty hard to get to another star system. Alpha Centauri is four light years away, so if you go at 10 per cent of the speed of light, it’s going to take you 40 years, and that’s assuming you can instantly reach that speed, which isn’t going to be the case. You have to accelerate. You have to build up to 20 or 30 per cent and then slow down, assuming you want to stay at Alpha Centauri and not go zipping past. It’s just hard. With current life spans, you need generational ships. You need antimatter drives, because that’s the most mass-efficient. It’s doable, but it’s super slow.

Hermione looked at him, not blinking. It was a moment before she replied, “I know that you served your time on Azkaban Station.” She looked out the porthole into the inky blackness of space, twirling her fork between her fingers. “Everyone here is hoping for a clean slate when they reach Alpha Centauri, but that will only happen if we all agree to forget and forgive the past. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve earned your redemption.

By this time somebody somewhere must have manned a radio transmitter, located a wavelength and broadcast a message back to the Vogon ships, to plead on behalf of the planet. Nobody ever heard what they said, they only heard the reply. The PA slammed back into life again. The voice was annoyed. It said: “What do you mean, you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light-years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that’s your own lookout. “Energize the demolition beams.

Do not hate them. They do not know they are evil. They are blind. If you hate them, if you kill them in your heart, they will not die. They will rise up again and again within you, and they will kill your heart.

Things don't always look as they seem. Some stars, for example, look like bright pinholes, but when you get them pegged under a microscope you find you're looking at a globular cluster—a million stars that, to us, presents as a single entity. On a less dramatic note there are triples, like Alpha Centauri, which up close turns out to be a double star and a red dwarf in close proximity. There's an indigenous tribe in Africa that tells of life coming from the second star in Alpha Centauri, the one no one can see without a high-powered observatory telescope. come to think of it, the Greeks, the Aboriginals, and the Plains Indians all lived continents apart and all, independently, looked at the same septuplet knot of the Pleiades and believed them to be seven young girls running away from something that threatened to hurt them. Make of it what you will.

Many scientists flatly denied the possibility. They pointed out that Discovery, the fastest ship ever designed, would take twenty thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri — and millions of years to travel any appreciable distance across the Galaxy. Even if, during the centuries to come, propulsion systems improved out of all recognition, in the end they would meet the impassable barrier of the speed of light, which no material object could exceed.

If there are beings alive on Alpha Centauri today, they remain blissfully ignorant of the rise of Donald Trump. It

If there are beings alive on Alpha Centauri today, they remain blissfully ignorant of the rise of Donald Trump.

Alpha Centauri,

In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

Given that humanity must one day flee the solar system to the nearby stars to survive, or perish, the question is: how will we get there? The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is over 4 light-years away. Conventional chemical propulsion rockets, the workhorses of the current space program, barely reach 40,000 miles per hour. At that speed it would take 70,000 years just to visit the nearest star.

It could very well be that if a grandfather paradox really gets going and history from the point of the twonky forward starts to come unglued... ...we all softly and suddenly vanish away. Not just you and me, but the Sun, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri and the Andromeda Galaxy. And so forth. This is known as the Cosmic Disgust Theory. Or: "If you’re going to play games like that, I’ll take my marbles and go home. Signed, God.

The question that naturally occurs is “What would it be like if a star exploded nearby?” Our nearest stellar neighbor, as we have seen, is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4.3 years to watch the light of this magnificent event spreading across the sky, as if tipped from a giant can. What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? Would people still go to work? Would farmers plant crops? Would anyone deliver them to the stores?

In 2016 I joined with the entrepreneur Yuri Milner to launch Breakthrough Starshot, a long-term research and development programme aimed at making interstellar travel a reality. If we succeed, we will send a probe to Alpha Centauri within the lifetime of people alive today.

If Only We Had Taller Been The fence we walked between the years Did bounce us serene. It was a place half in the sky where In the green of leaf and promising of peach We'd reach our hands to touch and almost touch the sky, If we could reach and touch, we said, 'Twould teach us, not to ,never to, be dead. We ached and almost touched that stuff; Our reach was never quite enough. If only we had taller been, And touched God's cuff, His hem, We would not have to go with them Who've gone before, Who, short as us, stood tall as they could stand And hoped by stretching, tall, that they might keep their land, Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul. But they, like us, were standing in a hole. O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall Across the Void, across the Universe and all? And, measured out with rocket fire, At last put Adam's finger forth As on the Sistene Ceiling, And God's hand come down the other way To measure man and find him Good, And Gift him with Forever's Day? I work for that. Short man, Large dream, I send my rockets forth between my ears, Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of years. Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall: We've reached Alpha Centauri! We're tall, O God, we're tall!

There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

What feet may reach against the mind’s arrogance soaring wingless to Alpha Centauri light years away, daring the arctic whalepath, piercing a bacterium’s elegant minutiae as it swims in amniotic oblivion in a Petri dish. Is the Universe ruled by chance or design? Who knows? How far is far, what measures near, enough or not, a little or too much?

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

So let's obey the Golden Rule, and give unto others what we would have others give unto us, How? When? Where? The answer is: All the time, everywhere.

Remember that your reputation is made by others, but your character is made by you!

Uncomprehending terror settled on the watching people of Earth. The terror moved slowly through the gathered crowds as if they were iron filings on a sheet of board and a magnet was moving beneath them. Panic sprouted again, desperate fleeing panic, but there was nowhere to flee to. Observing this, the Vogons turned on their PA again. It said: “There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.” The PA fell silent again and its echo drifted off across the land. The

shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

So many nights Patrick had looked up at the desert night sky trying to find meaning, trying to locate himself. He would always come back to the same thing: stargazing was time traveling. He’d looked it all up, read every book in the library. We see the sun as it was 8.3 minutes ago. Alpha Centauri—the next closest star—was 4.3 light-years away. When he looked at Alpha Centauri, he saw light that was generated when Joe was still alive. He even remembered the time, 4.3 years and a day after that fateful night, when he looked up at the sky to see the first light generated after Joe had died; he wept like a child. The North Star? Three hundred and twenty light-years. Its light was generated long before either he or Joe existed. It was a sucker’s game, he repeated, this time to himself. How can you tell where you’re going when you’re always looking up at the past?

I once watched a crowd of people wearing nothing but Speedos and Santa hats jog down Boylston in the middle of winter. I met a guy who could play the harmonica with his nose, a drum set with his feet, a guitar with his hands, and a xylophone with his butt all at the same time. I knew a woman who’d adopted a grocery cart and named it Clarence. Then there was the dude who claimed to be from Alpha Centauri and had philosophical conversations with Canada geese.

Education is one of the Grand Christianson Obsessions. They’ve been whole years my mother’s kept us home for intensive private study. As a result of that, Paul will perform the first brain transplant, James will someday build a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean, Charlie – who is an actual musical genius – will probably end up writing the Great American Symphony, and I – I know a little bit about a lot of things. I can tell you the chemical composition of the stuff your stick in your hair; how long it would take you, at just under the speed of light, to get to Alpha Centauri – and how old your body would be when you finally got there; the middle name of the third president of the United States; the amount of the present budget deficit; the author of the Brothers Karamazov, and how many feet there are in a line of trochaic heptameter. The Little Girl Who Had to Know Why, Paul used to call me. But even my mother couldn’t reconcile me and math.

In the long run, nearly all of them must succeed, for the mob is eternally virtuous, and the only thing necessary to get it in favor of some new and super-oppressive law is to convince it that that law will be distasteful to the minority that it envies and hates.

In conclusion, I return to Einstein. If we find a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, its image, captured by a camera travelling at a fifth of light speed, will be slightly distorted due to the effects of special relativity. It would be the first time a spacecraft has flown fast enough to see such effects. In fact, Einstein’s theory is central to the whole mission. Without it we would have neither lasers nor the ability to perform the calculations necessary for guidance, imaging and data transmission over twenty-five trillion miles at a fifth of light speed. We can see a pathway between that sixteen-year-old boy dreaming of riding on a light beam and our own dream, which we are planning to turn into a reality, of riding our own light beam to the stars. We are standing at the threshold of a new era. Human colonisation on other planets is no longer science fiction. It can be science fact. The human race has existed as a separate species for about two million years. Civilisation began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing. If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before. I hope for the best. I have to. We have no other option.

By the early twenty-second century, the technology for self-replicating robots should be perfected, and we may be able to entrust machines with the task of constructing solar arrays and laser batteries on the moon, Mars, and beyond. We would ship over an initial team of automatons, some of which would mine the regolith and others of which would build a factory. Another set of robots would oversee the sorting, milling, and smelting of raw materials in the factory to separate and obtain various metals. These purified metals could then be used to assemble laser launch stations—and a new batch of self-replicating robots. We might eventually have a bustling network of relay stations throughout the solar system, perhaps stretching from the moon all the way to the Oort Cloud. Because the comets in the Oort Cloud extend roughly halfway to Alpha Centauri and are largely stationary, they may be ideal locations for laser banks that could provide an extra boost to nanoships on their journey to our neighboring star system. As each nanoship passed by one of these relay stations, its lasers would fire automatically and give the ship an added push to the stars. Self-replicating robots could build these distant outposts by using fusion instead of sunlight as the basic source of energy.

If you are a true logos and I am a true logos, then there is the possibility of the dia-logos—a true dialogue...What is true dialogue in a world like ours? Our world is drowning in communication, but starving for genuine communio—the union of true communion...Profound communion, the flow of celestial language, becomes possible when we are speaking on the firm foundation of the Logos, the Word who became flesh, the One who redeemed the universe.

The relevant time scale for superhuman AI is less predictable, but of course that means it, like nuclear fission, might arrive considerably sooner than expected. One formulation of the “it’s too soon to worry” argument that has gained currency is Andrew Ng’s assertion that “it’s like worrying about overpopulation on Mars.”11 (He later upgraded this from Mars to Alpha Centauri.) Ng, a former Stanford professor, is a leading expert on machine learning, and his views carry some weight. The assertion appeals to a convenient analogy: not only is the risk easily managed and far in the future but also it’s extremely unlikely we’d even try to move billions of humans to Mars in the first place. The analogy is a false one, however. We are already devoting huge scientific and technical resources to creating ever-more-capable AI systems, with very little thought devoted to what happens if we succeed.

Întrebarea care se naşte în mod firesc este următoarea: ce s-ar întâmpla dacă ar exploda o stea prin apropiere? Cel mai apropiat vecin stelar al nostru, după cum am văzut, este Alpha Centauri, la 4,3 ani-lumină depărtare. Îmi imaginasem că, dacă s-ar produce o explozie acolo, atunci am avea 4,3 ani în care să privim lumina acestui eveniment magnific traversând cerul, ca şi cum ar curge dintr-o uriaşă cutie răsturnată. Cum ar fi dacă am avea patru ani şi patru luni pentru a urmări cum o catastrofă inevitabilă se îndreaptă către noi, ştiind că, atunci când în sfârşit va ajunge aici, ne va lua efectiv pielea de pe oase? Oare oamenii s-ar mai duce la muncă? Oare fermierii ar mai cultiva câmpul? Oare ar mai distribui cineva produsele în magazine? Câteva săptămâni mai târziu, când m-am întors în orăşelul din New Hampshire în care locuiesc, i-am pus aceste întrebări lui John Thorstensen, astronom la Colegiul Dartmouth. — A, nu! mi-a spus el râzând. Vestea unui astfel de eveniment călătoreşte cu viteza luminii, dar la fel şi efectul lui distrugător, aşa că ai afla de el şi ai muri din cauza lui în aceeaşi secundă. Dar nu-ţi face griji, pentru că nu o să se întâmple. Ca să fii omorât de suflul unei explozii de supernovă, mi-a explicat el, ar trebui să fii „ridicol de aproape” – probabil la mai puţin de zece ani-lumină ori chiar mai aproape. Pericolul l-ar reprezenta diferitele tipuri de radiaţii – raze cosmice şi altele asemenea. Acestea ar produce aurore fabuloase, perdele sclipitoare de lumină fantomatică umplând întregul cer. Şi acesta nu este un lucru bun. Tot ceea ce este suficient de puternic ca să declanşeze un asemenea spectacol ar putea foarte bine să distrugă magnetosfera, zona magnetică aflată mult deasupra Pământului care, în mod normal, ne protejează de razele ultraviolete şi de alte asalturi cosmice. În lipsa magnetosferei, oricine ar avea ghinionul să iasă la soare ar căpăta imediat aspectul, să zicem, al unei pizze uitate în cuptor.

The human mind is stimulated by change, motivated by meeting the challenge of novelty or threat or pleasure, rewarded with the sensations of being instrumental in altering environments, and will persevere in this as long as there is some degree of perceivable progress. People turn to knitting baby booties, doing crossword puzzles, collecting rare coins; they may even make an effort to understand E=mc2 or to study the genetic adaptations of cacti, but in all cases, they need to see some fruit of their labors.

We are resisting the technological corruption of our humanity with technology. We’re also resisting with our thinking, our perseverance, our friendships....In the end, we will find that even the best of tools can do no more than assist us. Certainly they cannot save us

For those who suffer disposal, the cost is their very lives. For those of us who survive, there is a creeping indifference to anything other than one’s own survival, which results in increased selfishness, hardness of heart, denial—which in the long range will bring about the devaluation of self. To counter this devaluation, therefore, one flees into pride of accomplishment. Isn’t what we do the defining measure of selfhood in our society?

Each tool reshapes the one who is apparently the master of the tool. I ask myself this: At what point does the tool, the servant, become the real master?

The nearest star, other than our sun, is called Proxima Centauri (also known as Alpha Centauri C), which is about four light-years away. That is so far that even with the fastest spaceship on the drawing boards today, a trip to it would take about ten thousand years.

Sayari yetu hujulikana kama Dunia na jua letu hujulikana kama Sol. Dunia imo ndani ya mfumo wa jua wa Sol. Mfumo wa jua wa Sol umo ndani ya mfumo wa jua wa Sol Sector au Solar Interstellar Neighborhood, kwenye wenzo wa Orion wa falaki ya Njiamaziwa, wenye mifumo ya jua zaidi ya 40 ikiwemo Alpha Centauri, Nemesis, Procyon na Sirius. Solar Interstellar Neighborhood imo ndani ya falaki ya Njiamaziwa yenye nyenzo nne zinazozunguka kwa pamoja na falaki nzima. Falaki ya Njiamaziwa imo ndani ya kishada (‘cluster’) chenye zaidi ya falaki 55 ikiwemo Andromeda, Leo A, M32 na Triangulum, kinachojulikanacho kama ‘the Local Galactic Group’. ‘The Local Galactic Group’ imo ndani ya mfumo wa kishada kikubwa zaidi kiitwacho Virgo Supercluster, chenye makundi zaidi ya 100 ya falaki. Virgo Supercluster imo ndani ya mfumo mwingine mkubwa zaidi wa vishada uitwao Laniakea (Local Supercluster) wenye vishada zaidi ya 500 vya falaki. Hapo ndipo mwisho wa ulimwengu wetu unaoweza kuonwa na wanasayansi wetu. Kutoka duniani mpaka Laniakea ni umbali wa kilometa bilioni trilioni 250, miaka bilioni 13.8 iliyopita.

Where are they going? Alpha Centauri. That's impossible. Very likely. But that's where they're going. Why? It's less impossible than here.

For humility and poverty, in themselves, the world has little liking and less respect. In the folk-lore of all races, despite the sentimentalization of abasement for dramatic effect, it is always power and grandeur that count in the end.

What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh? Is it because humor and sound sense are essentially antagonistic?

Do not fear being misunderstood and do not waste a minute thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering off direction, you will move straight to the goal. Keep your mind on the great and splendid things you would like to do, and then, as the days go gliding away, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the element it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual.. . . Thought is supreme. Preserve a right mental attitude - the attitude of courage, frankness, and good cheer. To think rightly is to create. All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed.

It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto, In God we trust, were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, Verboten, substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet.

If, for example, the waitress brings us mashed potatoes when we have ordered French fried, let's say: "I'm sorry to trouble you, but I prefer French fried." She'll probably reply, "No trouble at all" and will be glad to change the potatoes, because we have shown respect for her. Little phrases such as "I'm sorry to trouble you," "Would you be so kind as to ----? " "Won't you please?" " Would you mind?" "Thank you" - little courtesies like these oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life- and, incidentally, they are the hallmark of good breeding.

Bless what you receive; bless what you send out. God's plenteous substance moves in and through our mind constantly like a light shining in the darkness, but we do not comprehend it.

But I will not give them a share. Not one. Not for love. Nor for loyalty. Not to be fair. Because capitalism isn't fair. Life isn't fair. The lottery of what genes we are born with isn't fair. The moon and the stars and the gas clouds of Alpha Centauri aren't fair.

Perhaps it should have been painted police box blue.

You can say you’re from Alpha Centauri, or Middle-Earth… or L.A., for all I care.” Kevin chuckled softly. “Maybe I’m the one who’s crazy, because I’m so damn happy you’re here.

Now be honest-wouldn't you have expected e^i*pi to be (a) gibberish aling the lines of "elephant inkpie," or, if it were mathematically meaningful, to be (b) an infinitely complicated irrational number? Indeed, e^i*pi is a transcendental number raised to an imaginary transcendental power. And if (b) were the case, surely e^i*pi would not compute no matter how much computer power were available to try to pin down its value. As you know, neither (a) nor (b) is true, because e^i*pi = -1. (I suspect the fact that both (a) and (b) are provably false is the reason that Benjamin Peirce, the nineteenth-century mathematician, found Euler's formula (or a closely rekated formula) "absolutely paradoxical.") In other words, when the three enigmatic numbers are combined in this form, e^i*pi , they react together to carve out a wormhole that spirals through the infinite depths of number space to emerge smack dab in the heartland of integers. It's as if greenish-pink androids rocketing toward Alpha Centauri in 2370 had hit a space time anomaly and suddenly found themselves sitting in a burger joint in Topeka, Kansas, in 1956. Elvis, of course , was playing on the jukebox.

largest Globular Cluster in our Galaxy and contains approximately ten million stars. The English astronomer Edmond Halley was the first to officially classify Omega Centauri as a “non-stellar object.” Before the invention of the telescope Omega Centauri was classified as a star. Omega Centauri through a telescope This star cluster has been a subject of debate after astronomers found evidence of a black hole in its center. However, an updated measurement of star velocities within this cluster challenges these original observations. I’ll definitely look forward to following this story as Omega Centauri undergoes further observation. You can find Omega Centauri by forming a triangle between the Southern Cross and the bright star Rigel Kent (also known as Alpha Centauri). Difficulty: 2 Supernovae

Obviously, this is a system that has default atheism built into it from the beginning! When a person says, “I refuse to believe in the existence of invisible realities unless I see them,” they have, by definition, ended the game before it begins. If from the outset you insist that if God doesn’t show up in the telescope like Alpha Centauri or in the microscope like a DNA molecule, then God doesn’t exist, well, guess what, you’re going to “prove” that God doesn’t exist. Arguing that the self-sustaining Creator God doesn’t exist because God doesn’t appear in the category of contingent phenomenon is not a good-faith argument; it’s a trick.

nearest star, Alpha Centauri, some 24 trillion miles from earth. The galaxy to which our sun belongs, the Milky Way, contains hundreds of billions of stars. And astronomers estimate there are millions, or even billions of galaxies. What they can see leads them to estimate the number of stars in the universe at 1025. That is roughly the number of all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. The universe also bears witness to the tremendous wisdom and knowledge of its Creator. Scientists now speak of the Anthropic Principle, “which states that the universe appears to be carefully designed for the well-being of

Humanity is more comfortable than it’s ever been. But has it progressed? For hundreds of years, we’ve had the same status quo, with the occasional tune-up. What happened to the arts? The sciences? Where are our great storytellers, our great musicians, our brilliant scientists, our intrepid explorers? Why didn’t we go to Mars? To Jupiter? To Alpha Centauri? Where are our poets, our painters?” Lime slapped his thigh, and his voice grew louder and more insistent. “The next Beethoven has been born a dozen times in the last three hundred years, but the System made him an accountant every time because he was deaf, or because his fingers were the wrong length to play the piano, or some other eminently logical reason. “We don’t move forward,” Lime said, his voice suddenly weary. “We run in place. Because the System doesn’t care where we’re going, it only cares about counting steps.

The out-of-the-box California physicists beat their heads against this problem for years, but by the early 1980s, it became apparent that there is no way to send a signal via entanglement alone. For one thing, if you force one of a pair of entangled particles into a certain state, the entanglement with the other particle will be broken, so it will not “send” information about its state to its twin. You are limited to performing measurements of a particle’s uncertain value, which compels it to make up its mind about the (previously uncertain) state it is in. In that case, you can be sure its entangled twin will make the same choice, but then some additional information channel needs to be available to let your distant partner know what measurement you performed and what result you got. The latter part of the problem has an analogy in basic semantics. For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher. If I say “yes” to my wife, it can only be meaningless noise, a random word, unless my utterance was produced in the context of a question, like “Are you going to the store later?” Without knowing exactly how the physicist on Earth measured her particle, Alice, and what result she got, the change in Alice’s entangled partner Bob four light years away in that lab orbiting Alpha Centauri cannot be meaningful, even if it is information. The Earth physicist needs to send some slower-than-light signal to inform her distant colleague about her measurement and its outcome … which defeats the whole purpose of using entanglement to carry a message.47 This is also the problem with the metaphor of the universe as a computer. No matter how much computation the universe can perform, its outputs can be little more than out-of-context yesses and nos, addressed to no one in particular. If there is no “outside” to the system, there is nothing to compare it to and no one to give all those bit flips meaning. In fact, it is a lot like the planetary supercomputer “Deep Thought” in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: When, after millions of years of computation, it finally utters its output, “42,” no one knows what it means, because the question the computer had been programmed to answer has long been forgotten. We are now perhaps in a better position to understand how the behavior of atoms, photons, and subatomic particles could carry information about their future—tons of information—without any of it being meaningful to us, and why we would naturally (mis)construe it as randomness: It is noise to our ears, stuck as we are in the Now with no way of interpreting it. It is like the future constantly sending back strings of yesses and nos without us knowing the questions. We are only now realizing that there may indeed be words in all that noise—it’s not just gibberish. But how to decode them?

I hate guns and grenades, Backbone is superior to all weaponry. Reformer's CSF contains enough C4, To blow up Alpha Centauri.

The out-of-the-box California physicists beat their heads against this problem for years, but by the early 1980s, it became apparent that there is no way to send a signal via entanglement alone. For one thing, if you force one of a pair of entangled particles into a certain state, the entanglement with the other particle will be broken, so it will not “send” information about its state to its twin. You are limited to performing measurements of a particle’s uncertain value, which compels it to make up its mind about the (previously uncertain) state it is in. In that case, you can be sure its entangled twin will make the same choice, but then some additional information channel needs to be available to let your distant partner know what measurement you performed and what result you got. The latter part of the problem has an analogy in basic semantics. For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher. If I say “yes” to my wife, it can only be meaningless noise, a random word, unless my utterance was produced in the context of a question, like “Are you going to the store later?” Without knowing exactly how the physicist on Earth measured her particle, Alice, and what result she got, the change in Alice’s entangled partner Bob four light years away in that lab orbiting Alpha Centauri cannot be meaningful, even if it is information. The Earth physicist needs to send some slower-than-light signal to inform her distant colleague about her measurement and its outcome … which defeats the whole purpose of using entanglement to carry a message.47 This is also the problem with the metaphor of the universe as a computer. No matter how much computation the universe can perform, its outputs can be little more than out-of-context yesses and nos, addressed to no one in particular. If there is no “outside” to the system, there is nothing to compare it to and no one to give all those bit flips meaning. In fact, it is a lot like the planetary supercomputer “Deep Thought” in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: When, after millions of years of computation, it finally utters its output, “42,” no one knows what it means, because the question the computer had been programmed to answer has long been forgotten. We are now perhaps in a better position to understand how the behavior of atoms, photons, and subatomic particles could carry information about their future—tons of information—without any of it being meaningful to us, and why we would naturally (mis)construe it as randomness: It is noise to our ears, stuck as we are in the Now with no way of interpreting it. It is like the future constantly sending back strings of yesses and nos without us knowing the questions.

Well, that was well before awesome. People who say awesome now wouldn’t be born for another thirty years. What’s it about, Bern? Colonies on Alpha Centauri? Space ships shooting at each other with lasers?

This inexhaustible mind substance is available at all times and in all places to those who have learned to lay hold of it in consciousness. The simplest, shortest, and most direct way of doing this was explained when Jesus said, "Whosoever ... shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that what he saith cometh to pass, he shall have it.

Istanbul to Alpha Centauri, Cosmos courses in my corpuscles. Religion, nation, stuff it all, Benevolence makes the world livable.

What one observes is a horde of uneducated and inflammatory dunderheads, eager for power, intolerant of opposition and full of a childish vanity—a mob of holy clerks but little raised, in intelligence and dignity, above the forlorn half-wits whose souls they chronically rack. In the whole United States there is scarcely one among them who stands forth as a man of sense and information. Illiterate in all save the elementals, untouched by the larger currents of thought, drunk with their power over dolts, crazed by their immunity to challenge by their betters, they carry over into the professional class of the country the spirit of the most stupid peasantry, and degrade religion to the estate of an idiotic phobia. There is not a village in America in which some such preposterous jackass is not in eruption. Worse, he is commonly the leader of its opinion—its pattern in reason, morals and good taste. Yet worse, he is ruler as well as pattern. Wrapped in his sacerdotal cloak, he stands above any effective criticism. To question his imbecile ideas is to stand in contumacy of the revelation of God.

The Gaza Sonnet, 1264 (All Free or None Free) Al-Shams to Alpha Centauri, All occupied lands will be free. Till there is smile on every face, All happiness is blasphemy. Happiness is not an imperial merch, Freedom is no colonizer's heirloom. Joy is no bigot's ancestral bequest, Earth is not a zionist hand-me-down. Divide and rule is the law of animals, Unite and integrate is law of humanity. One human life is worth more, than all the gas reserves underneath. Gaza is not a place, Gaza is a wake up call, to the peace-crying humanity. Awake, Arise, O Citizens of Earth - Till all of us are free, none of us are free!

Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe read by desire. Haven't you read your Newton, she would like to say to the people in the dating agency (would like to say to Nietzsche too if she could get in touch with him)? Desire runs both ways. A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe. Or if desire is still too rude a word, then what of appetency? Appetency and chance: a powerful duo, more than powerful enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and the little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark back of beyond. The gods and ourselves, whirled helplessly around by the winds of chance, yet pulled equally towards each other, towards not only B and C and D but towards X and Y and Z and Omega too. Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love.

Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe ruled by desire. Haven't you read your Newton, she would like to say to the people in the dating agency (would like to say to Nietzsche too if she could get in touch with him)? Desire runs both ways: A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe. Or if desire is still too rude a word, then what of appetency? Appetency and chance: a powerful duo, more than powerful enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and the little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark back of beyond. The gods and ourselves, whirled helplessly around by the winds of chance, yet pulled equally towards each other, towards not only B and C and D but towards X and Y and Z and Omega too. Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love.

Al-Shams to Alpha Centauri, All occupied lands will be free. Till there is smile on every face, All happiness is blasphemy.

Good-bye, O fairest world, good-bye”, I soliloquized. “O blue gem in the heavens, where mankind dwells in love, and no man’s hand is lifted against another, and the gifted realize their every dream, and all things sing, and the light grows gold when the bells ring.” “Good poetry needn’t rhyme”, said Xue. “Besides, you shouldn’t tell lies.” “Lies? No, I was just dreaming.

Some people are saying she’s some kind of alien sent down here from Alpha Centauri or something,

He explained that he and his brother had been teleported to Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons, where they had seen a city of incredible beauty and Charlie was transported to Apu in Alpha Centauri. In Apu the people live underground because the surface is uninhabitable.

Half of the stars you see aren’t solo stars at all. They’re double, multiple, triple, quadruple star systems. Even, for example, the nearest star to the sun, Alpha Centauri, that’s a multiple star system.

Let's imagine we're standing together on the launch pad at NASA's Cape Canaveral facility near Orlando, and staring up at the stars together. As I write this, the last constellation above the horizon is Centaurus. The centaur's front head is a bright star. In fact, it's three stars—a pair called Alpha Centauri A and B, and, dimmest of the trio, Proxima Centauri. Here, look through this telescope. See? You can tell them apart. But what we can't see is that there is, in fact, a planet circling the faint light of Proxima Centauri. Man, I wish we could see it. Because that planet, Proxima Centauri b, is the nearest known exoplanet to Earth. [...] If we were to board a spacecraft and ride it from the outer edge of our atmosphere all the way to Proxima Centauri b, you and I, who boarded the ship fit and trim, chosen as we were from billions of applicants, would die before the voyage reached even 1/100th of the intervening distance. [...] At a speed of 20,000 miles per hour—the speed of our top-performing modern rockets—4.2 light years translates to more than 130,000 years of space travel. [...] So how will we ever get there? A generation ship. [...] the general notion is this: get enough human beings onto a ship, with adequate genetic diversity among us, that we and our fellow passengers cohabitate as a village, reproducing and raising families who go on to mourn you and me and raise new of their own, until, thousands of years after our ship leaves Earth's gravity, the distant descendants of the crew that left Earth finally break through the atmosphere of our new home. [...] A generation ship is every sociological and psychological challenge of modern life squashed into a microcosmic tube of survival and amplified—generation after generation. [...] The idea of a generation ship felt like a pointless fantasy when I first encountered it. But as I've spent the last few years speaking with technologists, academics, and policy makers about the hidden dangers of building systems that could reprogram our behavior now and for generations to come, I realized that the generation ship is real. We're on board it right now. On this planet, our own generation ship, we were once passengers. But now, without any training, we're at the helm. We have built lives for ourselves on this planet that extend far beyond our natural place in this world. And now we are on the verge of reprogramming not only the planet, but one another, for efficiency and profit. We are turning systems loose on the decks of the ship that will fundamentally reshape the behavior of everyone on board, such that they will pass those behaviors on to their progeny, and they might not even realize what they've done. This pattern will repeat itself, and play out over generations in a behavioral and technological cycle.

You are my Mecca, You are my Bethlehem, You are my El Dorada, You are my Washington. Istanbul to Alpha Centauri, Tu sonrisa es mi cura. California to Kanyakumari, Sen gülünce ben fakira.

Sonnet 1144 Istanbul to Alpha Centauri, Cosmos courses in my corpuscles. Religion, nation, stuff it all, Benevolence makes the world livable. Din, dünya, milliyet falan, hiç umurumda değil. Sen mutlu ol - bana yeter. Scripture, constitution, god, government, Nothing matters to me, except behavior. The greatest iftar is to break the fast of apathy, with the feast of affection. Sin humano no hay dios, Where there is no kindness there is no divine intervention. Sapiens intervention is divine intervention, There is nothing higher or more mighty. When we are obliterated in lifting the fallen, That's the living manifestation of the almighty.

Any artificial entity that’s willing to upload its neural state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the object factory.

Our world is drowning in communication, but starving for genuine communio—the union of true communion.

the amount of time it takes to reach the Earth from these stars will be greater if the aliens can’t travel at near light speed. If they can only travel at half light speed then it would take them 44 years to get from Tau Ceti, for example. If they can only travel at one-tenth light speed then only Alpha Centauri A and B would realistically be within range – and the aliens would have to come from a planet orbiting one of those stars too.

The size of a human cell is to that of a person as a person’s size is to that of Rhode Island. Likewise, a virus is to a person as a person is to the earth; an atom is to a person as a person is to the earth’s orbit around the sun; and a proton is to a person as a person is to the distance to Alpha Centauri.

- Veća stopa rasta. Peteljke i listovi okreću se malo-pomalo prema zvučnicima, kao da žude za izvorom. - Sigurni ste da to nije samo vaš umišljaj? Biljke ne mogu uživati u klasičnoj glazbi. - Biljke svakako nemaju osobnost, no uvjeravam vas da reagiraju pozitivno. Sve je to uvjetovano biologijom, naravno. - Svakako. Zastao je, neko vrijeme razmišljao, a zatim rekao: - I mi smo uvjetovani biologijom.

Kakva bi utjeha bila imati vlastite organske prijatelje i brinuti se za njih u ovomu usamljenom svemiru. Poput ljudi, oni su kombinacija trnja i zvijezda.

Nije li ova žudnja za plodnošću upisana u kod svakog ljudskog bića? Ja mislim da jest. Unatoč tome, kada jurimo za ovime ili onime, možemo biti potpuno slijepi za ono što se spremamo učiniti. I pitam se zašto ova žudnja obično usahne u pustinji međuljudskih odnosa. U pravoj pustinji rascvjeta se čak i kaktus.

Stari je asfalt bio grbav, utrt, posut šljunkom i izbrazdan i sav ispucao od vrućine. Vožnja po njoj bila je vrlo neugodna. "Tata!" požalio sam se glasno. "Tata, cesta je slomljena!" Nasmijao se i rekao: "Si, ali mi nismo slomljeni.

Mislila sam da ću umaknuti tamnomu oblaku uspomena - zato sam se prijavila na ovo putovanje. Sada vidim da svijet nosimo sa sobom kamo god da krenemo. Znam da se moramo tome oduprijeti. Je li to moguće? Nadam se jest - ne, nadam se da jest! Svaki je čovjek svijet za sebe, čitav svemir, zapravo.