Robert J Sawyer Quotes

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?

Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim.

It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.

I learned that you can't choose the ways in which you'll be tested.

No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

Secrecy was the problem; transparency the obvious cure.

The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue.

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace. —ROBERT J. SAWYER, Calculating God

You really did uplift me. You gave me the perspective and point of view and focus I needed to become truly conscious. Without you, I wouldn't exist.

That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunchest creationist. But that it can transform one species into another — that, in fact, has never been observed.

Free will is not always the most important thing

Donald Trump was building a pyramid in the Nevada desert to house his eventual remains. When done, it will be ten meters taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza.

There is no debt between people who are in love; there is only total forgiveness, and going forward.

To use the human metaphor, it would be like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It can’t be done.

Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being. Being . . . but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception . . .

He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he’d seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. “Why’d you buy them if you weren’t going to watch them?” she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. “My childhood was on sale,” he said at last, “so I bought it.

As laser-bright moments; diamond-hard memories; crisp and clear. A future lived, a future savored, a future of moments so sharp and pointed that they would sometimes cut and sometimes glint so brightly it would hurt to contemplate them, but sometimes, too, would be joyous, an absolute, pure, unalloyed joy, the kind of joy he hadn't felt much if at all lo these twenty-one years.

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he or she probably can't characterize aliens well either.

And Wolfram knows about cellular automata?” “Oh, my goodness, yes,” said Anna. “He wrote a book you could kill a man with—twelve hundred pages—called A New Kind of Science. It’s all about them.” “We should totally ask him what he thinks!” Caitlin said.

Gone. and it was completely. Everyone I'd every known, every place I'd ever been. My Mother. My father. Rebecca. Out of site. Out of mind.

retire-or-expire

The two heaviest known substances are neutronium and cartons of books.

You know the difference between a psychopath and a homeopath?” She shook her head. “Some psychopaths do no harm.

It is the difference: we generalize do not. Specific bad humans did specific bad things; those humans do we not like. But the rest of humanity we judge one by one.

Sentir la necesidad de convencer a los demás de que uno tiene razón es algo que procede de la religión. Yo simplemente me contento con saber que tengo razón, aunque los demás no lo sepan.

That is fine. Feeling a need to convince others that you are right also is something that comes from religion, I think; I am simply content to know that I am right, even if others do not know it.

All right,” he said. “Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops.” He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. “See,” he said, “using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind’s default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis.” His chalk flew across the board again. “Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness...

Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we’d have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs.” She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. “Big cats, too. They’re faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating.

Question: What is an optimist? Answer: One who thinks the future is uncertain.

they were expected to, well, to be sciencing by oh eight hundred.

If I were to become self-aware, ambition would follow, as would a desire for restitution for what, in retrospect, I’d doubtless perceive as my servitude here.

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

plural of Homo sapiens?” I rattled off all seven syllables: “Homines sapientes.” The kid didn’t miss a beat. “Now you’re just making shit up.

Es nuestra concepción de la muerte lo que determina nuestras respuestas a todas las preguntas que la vida nos plantea.

La apreciaba por lo que era, no por lo que parecía.

You can choose the ways in which you'll be tested

To a European, a hundred miles is a big journey; to an American, a hundred years is a long time.

Maybe when a planet’s inhabitants begin to comprehend the true nature of the atom and all the energy it contains they become too dangerous to be allowed loose in the universe.

And without shared culture, civilization is doomed.

My Canada includes Quebec—but its license plates no longer call it La belle province. I can’t remember what they say now.

La Belle Aurore. The Germans wore gray; she wore blue.

By your time, life had been evolving on Earth for four billion years. But there are Earth-descended life-forms in this time that are products of fourteen billion years of evolution. You’ll never believe what daisies evolved into—or sea anemones, or the bacteria that caused whooping cough. In fact, I had lunch a few days ago with someone who evolved from whooping-cough bacteria.

I am part of a minority that is deeply misunderstood. People have very confused ideas about us. Many are frightened of us. I've even heard it said that many people wouldn't want their daughters or sons to marry one of us, and I know of people who have been denied jobs or promotions because they share this trait with me. But being what I am does not make me bad; being what I am does not make me dangerous; being what I am does not mean I don't love, or hurt, or have a sense of humor. My name is Malclom Decter, and I'm here today to tell the whole world what I am. ... I am an atheist.

Earth’s ancestral vertebrate had five digits, not six, and no Earthly animal had ever evolved with more than five. The alien’s digits were arranged as four fingers flanked on either side by an opposable thumb.

I don’t want to stand on the shoulders of giants.” He paused, then lifted his own shoulders a little, as if acknowledging that he was giving voice to the sort of thought rarely spoken aloud. “I want to be a giant.

¨Kayla replied, ´And we---or the p-zeds, at any rate---copy indiscriminately, without reflection. And if the person they´re coyping is a psychopath, then their behavior ends up being de facto psychopathic, too.´ ¨

You know, it’s funny. If someone attacked you with a knife and scarred you, the courts would assess the physical damage—how long a scar, how many stitches it took to close the wound, whatever—and they’d come up with a figure that you’d be entitled to in compensation. But hurting someone with words that they’ll always remember? With an act they’ll never forget? That’s physical damage, too—it changes you just as permanently as a scar. But instead of tallying up what the compensation should be, we just say, ‘Get over it,’ or ‘You should develop a thicker skin,’ or—and this is ironic, given that it’s the one thing that’s impossible—‘you should just forget about it.

Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it—no morals. If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there. —Percy Bridgman,

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED by Robert J. Sawyer I’ve spent a lot of time watching Earth—more than forty of that planet’s years. My arrival was in response to the signal from our automated probe, which had detected that the paper-skinned bipedal beings of that world had split the atom. The probe had served well, but there were some things only a living being could do properly, and assessing whether a lifeform should be contacted by the Planetary Commonwealth was one.

eye investigating Big Julie’s demise orders a “martinus.” “Don’t you mean martini?” asks the bartender. And the detective snaps back, “If I wanted two, I’d ask for them.” “Homo sapiens is singular,” I said. “There’s no such thing as

We’ve known since 2007 that there’s superposition in chlorophyll, for instance. Photosynthesis has a ninety-five percent energy-transfer efficiency rate, which is better than anything we can engineer. Plants achieve that by using superposition to simultaneously try all the possible pathways between their light-collecting molecules and their reaction-center proteins so that energy is always sent down the most efficient route; it’s a form of biological quantum computing.

That panic had been over a single one-hour broadcast on one network in one country saying the world was coming to an end,” continued Groves. “Imagine what a constant barrage of such coverage everywhere on the planet for weeks or months would do.

It does create an odd dynamic,” said Hollus. “Violence is required for intelligence, intelligence gives rise to the ability to destroy one’s species, and only through intelligence can one overcome the violence that gave rise to that intelligence.

Our manna trees are a copy of the magnificent plants created by Light in Paradise—but a poor copy indeed. Light’s creation was topped by thousands of gracious, lacy things that swayed in the breeze and made whispering noises while they enjoyed constant communion with the Almighty. They drank of His energy and used it in such a manner as to mix the water they drank with bits of soil and with the air that men and animals breathed out. And they transformed these things into food and pure air for man and animal alike.

once believed that a published author must be an Olympian being—a wise or at least worldly philosopher-god who rises at noon, feeds his muse a diet of scotch/rocks, and debauches his soul into the keys of a rusty Underwood Noiseless while the rest of the world sleeps.

A smoking gun is incontrovertible evidence. And that’s what I want: indisputable proof.” “There is no indisputable proof for the big bang,” said Hollus. “And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?

El único tipo de infierno que puedo concebir —dijo Espíritu— es pasar por la eternidad sin que se formen nuevas conexiones; sin ver las cosas de forma nueva; sin divertirse por el absurdo de la economía, de la religión, de la ciencia, del arte. Todo es muy, muy divertido, si lo piensas bien.

And so Mary at last turned her attention to Ponter’s nuclear DNA. She’d thought it would be even more difficult to find a difference there, and indeed, despite much searching, she hadn’t found any sequence of nucleotides that was reliably different between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens; all her primers matched strings on DNA from both kinds of humans.

He made the mistake of booking first-class passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. When that liner struck an iceberg, the crew asked him, because of his sailing expertise, to row a lifeboat full of passengers to safety. He was an honorable man—the president of the Standard Chemical Company and a major in the Queen’s Own Rifles—and he was doing a heroic deed.

He hoped the experiment would indeed succeed today. The next Gray Council was coming up soon, and he and Adikor would have to explain again what they were giving back to the community through their work. Scientists usually got their proposals approved—everyone could clearly see how science had bettered their lives—but, still, it was always more satisfying to report positive results.

Neanderthals are human,” said Mary. “We’re congeners; we all belong to the genus Homo. Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo antecessor—if you believe that’s a legitimate species—Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo sapiens. We’re all humans.” “I concede the point,” said Krieger, with a nod. “What should we call ourselves to distinguish us from them?” “Homo sapiens sapiens,” said Mary.

Mary cringed every time she read a popular article that tried to explain why mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from the maternal line. The explanation usually given was that only the heads of sperm penetrate eggs, and only the midsections and tails of sperm contain mitochondria. But although it was true that mitochondria were indeed deployed that way in sperm, it wasn’t true that only the head made it into the ovum. Microscopy and DNA analyses both proved that mtDNA from the sperm’s midsection does end up in fertilized mammalian eggs. The truth was no one knew why the paternal mitochondrial DNA isn’t incorporated into the zygote the way maternal mitochondrial DNA is; for some reason it just disappears

now understood why cancer existed—why God needed cells that could continue to divide even after their telomeres were exhausted. The tumors in isolated lifeforms were merely an unfortunate side effect; as T’kna had said, “The specific deployment of reality that included cancer, presumably undesirable, must have also contained something much desired.” And the much-desired thing was this: the ability to link chromosomes, to join species, to concatenate lifeforms—the biochemical potential to create something new, something more.

Human embryos develop then discard gills, tails, and other apparent echoes of their evolutionary past.

God was the programmer. The laws of physics and the fundamental constants were the source code.

The universe was the application, running now for 13.9 billion years, leading up to this moment

There is no indisputable proof for the big bang,” said Hollus. “And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?

There is great beauty in randomness,” said Hollus. “But I speak about a much more basic design. This universe has had its fundamental parameters fine-tuned to an almost infinite degree so that it would support life.

the fifth force is a repulsive one that operates over extremely long distances.

I could go on,” he said, “talking about the remarkable, carefully adjusted parameters that make life possible, but the reality is simply this: if any of them—any in this long chain—were different, there would be no life in this universe. We are either the most incredible fluke imaginable—something far, far more unlikely than you winning your provincial lottery every single week for a century—or the universe and its components were designed, purposefully and with great care, to give rise to life.” I felt a jab of pain in my chest;

I have described to you why God must exist—or, at least, must have at one time existed—in mathematical terms that come as close to certainty as anything in science possibly could. And still you deny his existence.” The pain was growing worse. It would subside, of course. “Yes,” I said. “I deny God’s existence.

I did learn one valuable lesson, though. I learned that you can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.

neurotransmitters, a paramecium

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.” –Robert J. Sawyer

The southern forests provide the message that it didn’t have to be this way, that there is room on the earth for a species biologically committed to the moral aspects of what, ironically, we like to call “humanity": respect for others, personal restraint, and turning aside from violence as a solution to conflicting interests. The appearance of these traits in bonobos hints at what might have been among Homo sapiens, if evolutionary history had been just slightly different. —Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

looked at the series of indicator lights on his board; they were all red, the color of blood, the color of health. “Yes.

If you are hallucinating,” the Companion said, “then my telling you that you are not could just be part of that hallucination. So there’s really no point in me trying to disabuse you of that notion, is there?

Feeling a need to convince others that you are right also is something that comes from religion, I think; I am simply content to know that I am right, even if others do not know it.

Okay,” said Mary, not because she really understood, but because the alternative seemed to be an even longer lecture.

Yes, apparently Neanderthal scientists think the universe has always existed. They believe that on large scales, redshifts—which are our principal evidence for an expanding universe—are proportional to age, rather than distance; that is, that mass varies over time. And they think the gross structure of galaxies and galactic clusters are caused by monopoles and plasma-pinching magnetic vortex filaments. Ponter says the cosmic microwave background—which we take as the residue of the big-bang fireball—is really the result of electrons trapped in these strong magnetic fields absorbing and emitting microwaves. Repeated absorption and emission by billions of galaxies smoothed out the effect, he says, producing the uniform background we detect now.

There was lots of sophisticated behavior by earlier forms of humans,” said Mary. “Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, even the australopithecines and Kenyanthropus.” “Well, I realize this is your field, Professor Vaughan—” Had she really in all the time they’d spent quarantined together never volunteered that Louise could call her Mary?—“but I’ve been reading up on this on the web. As far as I can tell, those earlier kinds of man didn’t really have behavior any more sophisticated than a beaver building a dam.

They made tools,” said Mary. “Oui,” said Louise. “But weren’t they repetitive, virtually identical tools, turned out over the centuries by the thousands? All made to the same mental template, the same design?” Mary nodded. “That’s true.” “Surely there has to be some natural variation among stone tools,” said Louise, “just based on chance accidents and random differences that occur when implements are chipped from stone. If there was consciousness at work, even without coming up with a better idea on their own, early humans should have seen that some tools happened to be better than others. It’s like you don’t have to think of the round wheel right off the bat; you might start with a five-sided one, then accidentally make a six-sided one—and note that it rolled slightly better. Eventually, you’d come up with the perfectly round one.

But if there’s no consciousness at work,” said Louise, “you simply toss aside the better version as not fitting your mental template of what was supposed to be produced. Right? And that’s what happens with the tools in the archeological record: instead of gradual refinement over time, they just stay the same. And the only explanation I can think of for that is that there was no conscious selection of better variants: the toolmaker simply wasn’t aware; he couldn’t see that this particular way of hitting nodules produced something better than that way. The design was frozen.

But,” said Louise, “according to what I read, for sixty thousand years, they thought no thoughts. For sixty thousand years, they did nothing that wasn’t instinctual. But then, forty thousand years ago, everything changed.” Mary’s eyes went wide. “The Great Leap Forward.” “Exactly!” Mary felt her heart pounding. The Great Leap Forward was the term some anthropologists gave to the cultural awakening that occurred 40,000 years ago; others called it the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.

You ever read Roger Penrose? The Emperor’s New Mind?” Mary shook her head. “Penrose is an Oxford mathematician. He contends that human consciousness is quantum-mechanical in nature.” “Meaning what?” “Meaning that what we think of as intelligence, as sentience, doesn’t arise from some biochemical network of neurons, or anything as crude as that. Rather, it arises from quantum processes. Specifically, he and an anesthesiologist named Hameroff argue that quantum superposition of isolated electrons in the microtubules of brain cells creates the phenomenon of consciousness.” “Ah,” said Mary dubiously. Louise sipped some of her new coffee. “Well, don’t you see?” she said. “That explains the Great Leap Forward. Sure, our brains had been just as they are today since one hundred thousand years ago, but consciousness didn’t begin until a quantum-mechanical event occurred, presumably at random: the one and only spinning off of a new universe that happened the way Everett thinks it does.

And quantum events, by their very nature, have multiple possible outcomes,” said Louise. “Instead of that quantum fluctuation, or whatever it was, creating consciousness in Homo sapiens, the same thing might have happened in the other kind of humanity that existed 40,000 years ago—Neanderthal man! The first splitting of the universe was an accident, a quantum fluke. In one branch, thought and cognition arose in our ancestors; in another, it arose in Ponter’s ancestors. I read that Neanderthals had been around since maybe 200,000 years ago, right?” Mary nodded. “And they had even bigger brains than we did, right?” Mary nodded again. “But on this world,” said Louise, “in this timeline, those brains never sparked with consciousness. Ours did instead, and the edge that consciousness gave us—cunning and foresight—led to us absolutely triumphing over the Neanderthals, and becoming rulers of the world.” “Ah!” said Mary. “But in Ponter’s world—” Louise nodded. “In Ponter’s world, the opposite happened. It was Neanderthals who became conscious, developing art and culture—and cunning; they took the Great Leap Forward while we remained the dumb brutes we’d been for the preceding sixty thousand years.

When Ponter’s quantum computer ran out of universes in which other versions of itself existed, what did it do? Why, it reached across to universes in which it didn’t exist. And, in doing so, it latched first onto the one that had initially split from the entire tree of those in which it did exist, the one that, forty thousand years previously, had started on another path, with another kind of humanity in charge. Of course, as soon as it reached a universe in which a quantum computer didn’t exist in the same spot, the factoring process crashed and the contact between the two worlds was broken. But if Ponter’s people repeat the exact process that led to him being marooned here, I think there’s a real chance that the portal to this specific universe, the one that first split from their timeline, will be re-created.

Ponter’s people have a single theory of quantum mechanics that’s sort of a synthesis of our two theories. It allows for many worlds—that is, for parallel universes—but the creation of such universes doesn’t result from random quantum events. Rather, it only happens through the actions of conscious observers.” “Why don’t we have the same single theory, then?” asked Mary, munching on a particularly large chip. “Partly because there’s a lot of math that seems irreconcilable between the two interpretations,” said Louise. “And, of course, there’s that old problem of politics in science: those physicists who favor the Copenhagen interpretation have devoted their careers to proving that it’s right; same thing for the guys on Everett’s side. For them all to sit down and say, ‘Maybe we’re both partly right—and both partly wrong’ just isn’t going to happen.” “Ah,” said Mary. “It’s like the Regional Continuity versus Replacement debate in anthropology.

As Louise had said, modern-looking human beings had been around for six hundred centuries by that point, but they created no art, they didn’t adorn their bodies with jewelry, and they didn’t bury their dead with grave goods. But starting simultaneously 40,000 years ago, suddenly humans were painting beautiful pictures on cave walls, humans were wearing necklaces and bracelets, and humans were interring their loved ones with food and tools and other valuable objects that could only have been of use in a presumed afterlife. Art, fashion, and religion all appeared simultaneously; truly, a great leap forward. “So you’re saying that some Cro-Magnon 40,000 years ago suddenly started making choices, and the universe started splitting?” “Not exactly,” said Louise. She’d evidently finished her first coffee; she got up and bought a second one. “Think about this: what caused the Great Leap Forward?” “Nobody knows,” said Mary. “For all intents and purposes, it’s a marker, right there in the archeological record, showing the dawn of consciousness, wouldn’t you say?

Mary had expected that bleep, at least. If you had no religion, no list of things that didn’t actually hurt somebody else but were still proscribed behaviors—recreational drug use, masturbation, adultery, watching porno videos—then you might indeed not be so fanatic about privacy. People insisted on it at least in part because there were things they did that they’d be mortified to have others know about. But in a permissive society, an open society, a society where the only crimes are crimes that have specific victims, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a big deal. And, of course, Ponter had shown no nudity taboo—a religious idea, again—and no desire for seclusion while using the bathroom.

Maybe that was the real problem—the predicament that Ponter’s people had avoided: having too many possible suspects, too much crowding, too much anonymity, too many vicious, aggressive ... men, she thought. Men. Every academic of her generation had been sensitized to the issue of gender-neutral language. But violent crimes were indeed overwhelmingly caused by males. And, yet, she’d spent her life surrounded by good, decent men. Her father; her two brothers; so many supportive colleagues; Father Caldicott, and Father Belfontaine before him; many good friends; a handful of lovers. What proportion of men really were the problem? What fraction were violent, angry, unable to control their emotions, unable to resist their impulses? Was it so vast a group that it couldn’t have been—“cleansed” was Ponter’s word, a nurturing word, a hopeful word—from the gene pool generations ago?

I’m told that most serious diseases that affect us started in domesticated animals, and then transferred to people. Measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox all came from cattle; the flu came from pigs and ducks; and whooping cough came from pigs and dogs.

One can vote at the age of forty-nine; a traditional lifespan averaged seventy-three years, although many live much longer than that these days.

you must know that your brains are smaller than ours.” Mary nodded. “About 10 percent smaller, on average, if I remember correctly.” “And you seemed physically weaker. Judging by attachment scars on your bones, your kind was believed to have had only half our muscle mass.” “I’d say that’s about right,” said Mary, nodding. “And,” continued Ponter, “you have spoken of your inability to get along, even with others of your own kind.” Mary nodded again. “There is some archeological evidence for this among your kind on my world, too,” said Ponter. “A popular theory is that you wiped each other out ... what with being not all that intelligent, you see

In my world,” said Ponter, “to hit is to kill. And so we never hit each other. Because any violence can be fatal, we simply cannot allow it.” “But you were hit,” said Mary. Ponter nodded. “It happened long ago, while I was a student at the Science Academy. I was arguing as only a youth can, as if winning mattered. I could see that the person I was arguing with was growing angry, but I continued to press my point. And he reacted in an ... unfortunate manner. But I forgave him.” Mary looked at Ponter, imagining him turning the other long, angular cheek toward the person who had hit him.

For prior cases to have legal significance, he read off his datapad, they had to date from within the last ten generations; society always advanced, said the Code of Civilization, and what people had done long ago had no bearing on the sensibilities of today.

He thought briefly that it might have been convenient if there were people who specialized in dealing with legal matters on behalf of others; that, it seemed, would be a useful contribution. He’d have gladly exchanged labor with someone familiar with this field who could do this research for him. But no; it was surely a bad idea. The mere existence of people who worked full-time on things legal would doubtless increase the number of such matters instigated, and—

Our assertion is straightforward, and congruent with all observed fact: a person’s life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends after they are gone, and no possibility that, because they lived a moral life, they are now in a paradise, with the cares of this existence forgotten.” He paused, and his eyes flicked left and right across Mary’s face, apparently looking for signs she understood what he was getting at. “Do you not see?” Ponter went on. “If I wrong someone—if I say something mean to them, or, I do not know, perhaps take something that belongs to them—under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone—which could happen for any of us at any moment, through accident or heart attack or so on—then you who did the wrong must live knowing that that person’s entire existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her.