Dyson Space Quotes

NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!

I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base. And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges. Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding.

The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

We must regard science, then, from three points of view. First, it is the free activity of man's divine faculties of reason and imagination. Secondly, it is the answer of the few to the demands of the many for wealth, comfort and victory, gifts which it will grant only in exchange for peace, security and stagnation. Finally it is man's gradual conquest, first of space and time, the of matters as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul.

Deep Space Nine was a Star Trek for the complex, conflict-ridden post–Cold War era. Whereas The Next Generation captured a shining moment of utopian optimism, Deep Space Nine was the thud of reality intruding upon fantasy. It

The philosopher had postulated that a thought was somehow a collapse of the quantum mechanical wave function to a specific state. He further postulated that unlike someone putting their finger in running water to reduce the temperature possibilities to one value, in the presence of enough space-time curvature, probabilities are reduced to an actual state without need of an observer.

Most black folk get the moral intent of black prophecy and believe that they and their divine mouthpieces have a God-given right to express their gripes in the privacy of sacred space. They do not mistake anger at America’s imperial excesses for hatred of the nation or a denial of the wonderful changes that can unfold in the country when courage weds imagination.

In our universe, we measure time with clocks, and computers have a “clock speed,” but the clocks that govern the digital universe are very different from the clocks that govern ours. In the digital universe, clocks exist to synchronize the translation between bits that are stored in memory (as structures in space) and bits that are communicated by code (as sequences in time). They are clocks more in the sense of regulating escapement than in the sense of measuring time.

As scientists would discover after Einstein’s death, Schwarzschild’s odd theory was right. Stars could collapse and create such a phenomenon, and in fact they often did. In the 1960s, physicists such as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler, Freeman Dyson, and Kip Thorne showed that this was indeed a feature of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, one that was very real. Wheeler dubbed them “black holes,” and they have been a feature of cosmology, as well as Star Trek episodes, ever since.3 Black holes have now been discovered all over the universe, including one at the center of our galaxy that is a few million times more massive than our sun. “Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our universe,” says Dyson. “They are the only places in the universe where Einstein’s theory of relativity shows its full power and glory. Here, and nowhere else, space and time lose their individuality and merge together in a sharply curved four-dimensional structure precisely delineated by Einstein’s equations.”4 Einstein

Black holes have now been discovered all over the universe, including one at the center of our galaxy that is a few million times more massive than our sun. “Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our universe,” says Dyson. “They are the only places in the universe where Einstein’s theory of relativity shows its full power and glory. Here, and nowhere else, space and time lose their individuality and merge together in a sharply curved four-dimensional structure precisely delineated by Einstein’s equations.

But it happens at least equally often in the history of science that the understanding of the component parts of a composite system is impossible without an understanding of the behavior of the system as a whole. And it often happens that the understanding of the mathematical nature of an equation is impossible without a detailed understanding of its solutions. The black hole is a case in point. One could say without exaggeration that Einstein's equations of general relativity were understood only at a very superficial level before the discover of the black hole. During the fifty years since the black hole was invented, a deep mathematical understanding of the geometrical structure of space-time has slowly emerged, with the black hole solution playing a fundamental role in the structure. The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.

Galison uses critical opalescence as a metaphor for the merging of technology, science, and philosophy that happened in the minds of Poincare and Einstein in the spring of 1905. Poincare and Einstein were immersed in the technical tools of time signaling, but the tools by themselves did not lead them to their discoveries. They were immersed in the mathematical ideas of electrodynamics, but the ideas by themselves did not lead them to their discoveries. They were also immersed in the philosophy of space and time. Poincare had written a philosophical book, Science and Hypothesis, which Einstein studied, digging deep into the foundations of knowledge and criticizing the Newtonian notions of absolute space and time. But the philosophy by itself did not lead them to their discoveries. What was needed to give birth to the theory of relativity was a critical moment, when tools, ideas, and philosophical reflections jostled together and merged into a new way of thinking. Galison would like to put an end to the argument between Kuhnians and Galisonians. In this book he takes his position squarely in the middle: "Attending to moments of critical opalescence offers a way out of this endless oscillation between thinking of history as ultimately about ideas or fundamentally about material objects.

A post-racial outlook seeks to ignore, or destroy, race; a post-racist outlook seeks to destroy racism. There is more than semantics in the balance. Race may be a fiction, but like all good fiction, say, Moby-Dick or The Color Purple, it may be true even when it is not real. [...] What is not true about race is the alleged biological input that separates one group from another; what is true about race is that culture and identity are invented in space, and build, or erode, over time. What is not true about race is that the intelligence of members of a group is innate and tied exclusively to a group's genetic structure; what is true about race is that different qualities in a group are born when opportunity marries environment. What is not true about race is that the information we gather about groups under the imperatives of stereotype is reliable; what is true about race is that stereotypes are a hazardous way to find out about cultures, and are poor substitutes for direct experience and wise reflection.

Bits that are embodied as structure (varying in space, invariant across time) we perceive as memory, and bits that are embodied as sequence (varying in time, invariant across space) we perceive as code. Gates are the intersections where bits span both worlds at the moments of transition from one instant to the next.

Even the stars had been obscured, their light stolen by Dyson masks: dense orbiting habitat clouds, even solid spheres, asteroids and planets dismantled and made into traps for every stray photon. It was a depressing sight: an engineered sky, a sky full of scaffolding and ruins.

The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time. “It is an irony of fate,” observes Françoise Ulam, “that much of the high-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man’s monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.

The question of whether the energy produced by a small fission explosion could be channeled outward to drive the propulsion of a space vehicle was similar to the question of whether this energy could be channeled inward to drive the implosion of a thermonuclear bomb. Ulam’s idea was the hydrogen bomb turned inside out.

the "it's as if you are there" of screen-based media is truncated to a "you are there": one is in cyberspace, not watching it; one is a navigator, not a viewer. By "being in," rather than "looking at," virtual environments, the viewer is said to occupy the space and time, the here and now, the virtual present of a separate but ontologically real space.

Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression.

I owe Kent Joosten of the Johnson Space Center, NASA, even more gratitude than usual for his contribution to the cephalopod sections. Thanks also to Eric Brown and Simon Bradshaw for reading manuscript drafts. • The idea that squid and other cephalopods may be intelligent is real. A recent reference is New Scientist of 7 June 1997; Cephalopod Behaviour by R. T. Hanlon and J. B. Messenger (Cambridge University Press, 1996) was a valuable source. • The riches available to us from the asteroids and other extraterrestrial resources, and plans to exploit those riches, are real. A good recent survey is Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis (Addison Wesley, 1996). • The probabilistic doomsday prediction called here the “Carter catastrophe” is real. It has been well expressed by John Leslie in The End of the World (Routledge, 1996). • The “Feynman radio” idea of using advanced electromagnetic waves to pick up messages from the future is real. This has actually been attempted, for example by I. Schmidt and R. Newman (Bulletin of the American Physical Society, vol. 25, p. 581, 1979). And the extension of the idea to quantum mechanics (the “transactional interpretation”) is real. See John Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 58, p. 647, 1986. • Cruithne, Earth’s “second Moon,” is real. Its peculiar properties were reported in Nature, vol. 387, p. 685, 1997. • The “quark-nugget” idea of collapsed matter, with its potentially disastrous implications, is real. It was proposed by E. Witten in “Cosmic Separation of Phases,” Physical Review D, vol. 30, p. 272, 1984. • The physics of the possible far future drawn here is real. A classic reference is “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” F. Dyson, Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, p. 447, 1979. • The idea that our universe is one of an evolutionary family is real. A recent variant of the theory has been developed by L. Smolin in his book The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997). • The notion of vacuum decay is real. It was explored by P. Hut and M. Rees in “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?” Nature, vol. 302, p. 508, 1983. The rest is fiction.

She glanced around the sky. She was a hundred light-years from home, a hundred light-years in toward the center of the Galaxy, roughly along a line that would have joined Earth to Antares, in Scorpio. But the sky was dark, dismal. There were no asteroid belts, only a handful of comets left orbiting farther out, and two gas giants both stripped of their volatiles, reduced to smooth rocky balls. She was well inside the interstellar colonization wave front that appeared to be sweeping out along the spiral arm and was nearing Earth, a hundred light-years back. And this was a typical post-wave-front system: colonized, ferociously robbed of its resources by one shortsighted, low-tech predatory strategy or another, trashed, abandoned. Even the stars had been obscured, their light stolen by Dyson masks: dense orbiting habitat clouds, even solid spheres, asteroids and planets dismantled and made into traps for every stray photon. It was a depressing sight: an engineered sky, a sky full of scaffolding and ruins. Earth’s sky was primeval, comparatively. This was a glimpse of the future, for Earth.