Satellite Stories Quotes

She couldn't disappoint the whole village. There were no wallscreens here, no newsfeeds or satellites bands, and touring soccer teams were no doubt few and far between. (...), that made stories a valuable commodity, and it probably wasn't very often that a stranger dropped in from the sky.

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on. I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives -- maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on. That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astair or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an 'exhibitionist.' How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, 'Wow! Were you ever _drunk_ last night!

Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.

The audience burst into applause and hallelujahs. I kept trying to make sense of it, and kept coming up short. Here were people who routinely used their computers to stay in touch with their friends and get the news of the day, people who took weather satellites and lung transplants for granted, people who expected to live lives thirty and forty years longer than those of their great-grandparents. Here they were, falling for a story that made Santa and the Tooth Fairy look like gritty realism.

The answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died. There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness.

In Hamilton's The Universe Wreckers... it was in that novel that, for the first time, I learned Neptune had a satellite named Triton... It was from The Drums of Tapajos that I first learned there was a Mato Grosso area in the Amazon basin. It was from The Black Star Passes and other stories by John W. Campbell that I first heard of relativity. The pleasure of reading about such things in the dramatic and fascinating form of science fiction gave me a push toward science that was irresistible. It was science fiction that made me want to be a scientist strongly enough to eventually make me one. That is not to say that science fiction stories can be completely trusted as a source of specific knowledge... However, the misguidings of science fiction can be unlearned. Sometimes the unlearning process is not easy, but it is a low price to pay for the gift of fascination over science.

Ultimately, intelligence work isn’t about satellites, budgets, oversight committees, or high-tech gadgetry. It’s about the motivation and skills of your people.

Malchow, one of Ravensbrück’s satellites, a camp of well-organised scarcity and orderly starvation

the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest. Shortages

Clandestine Service, tells us a story about the building at the center of the Pentagon courtyard, which is now a food court but used to be a hot dog stand. Chesnutt explains that during the height of the Cold War, when satellite technology first came into being, Soviet analysts monitoring the Pentagon became convinced that the building was the entrance to an underground facility, like a nuclear missile silo. The analysts could find no other explanation as to why thousands of people entered and exited this tiny building, all day, every day. Apparently the Soviets never figured it out, and the hot dog stand remained a target throughout the Cold War—along with the rest of the Pentagon. It’s a great anecdote and makes one wonder what really is underneath the Pentagon, which is rumored to have multiple stories belowground.

I looked at her like her eyes were newly discovered planets. I wanted to know all about them. All their oceans, forests, deserts and their satellites. I had become a satellite myself. I was revolving around her with the hope of getting close to her. Like a moth circling around the fire, I was ready to be burned.

Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died. There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free.

Look, you: there are enough stars for everyone tonight, and among them shine the satellites, those counterfeit coins. He reaches for, but does not catch, a falling star. Less, at last, goes to bed. But he cannot stop thinking of what Lewis has told him. Not the story about the ten years, but the idea of being alone. He realizes that, even after Robert, he never truly let himself be alone. Even here, on this trip: first Bastian, then Javier. Why this endless need for a man as a mirror? To see the Arthur Less reflected there? He is grieving, for sure—the loss of his lover, his career, his novel, his youth—so why not cover the mirrors, rend the fabric over his heart, and just let himself mourn? Perhaps he should try alone.

I Remember Babylon First published in Playboy, March 1960 Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds This is one of the rare cases where I violated Sam Goldwyn’s excellent rule: ‘If you gotta message, use Western Union.’ This story was a message, five years before the first commercial communications satellite was launched, warning of their possible danger. Apart from some minor political earthquakes, everything in it has since come true.

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

I kept trying to make sense of it, and kept coming up short. Here were people who routinely used their computers to stay in touch with their friends and get the news of the day, people who took weather satellites and lung transplants for granted, people who expected to live lives thirty and forty years longer than those of their great-grandparents. Here they were, falling for a story that made Santa and the Tooth Fairy look like gritty realism. He was feeding them shit and they were loving it.

Sometimes I hear Mark laugh, and some days in the car the right song will come on the satellite radio and I'll feel him there tingling like a phantom limb. Like he's sitting there next to me in the dark. But I know that's not so. And I know that when you die there's not even darkness, and I know Mark and me won't meet on some cloud or in some pit of fire. And I guess that's a good thing. I couldn't take those eyes seeing what's become of me, those eyes looking down at my hands and my chewed-up ragged nails.

The more honest we are, the better,” Gorbachev said, suggesting that they should at least provide specific information to the governments of the Soviet satellite states, to Washington, DC, and London. “You’re right,” said Anatoly Dobrynin, recently appointed to the Central Committee after twenty years as the Soviet ambassador to the United States. “After all, I’m sure the photos are already on Reagan’s desk.” They agreed to cable statements to their ambassadors in world capitals, including Havana, Warsaw, Bonn, and Rome. “Should we give information to our people?” asked Aliyev. “Perhaps,” Ligachev replied.

No direct evidence yet documents Earth’s tidal cycles more than a billion years ago, but we can be confident that 4.5 billion years ago things were a lot wilder. Not only did Earth have five-hour days, but the nearby Moon was much, much faster in its close orbit, as well. The Moon took only eighty-four hours—three and a half modern days—to go around Earth. With Earth spinning so fast and the Moon orbiting so fast, the familiar cycle of new Moon, waxing Moon, full Moon, and waning Moon played out in frenetic fast-forward: every few five-hour days saw a new lunar phase. Lots of consequences follow from this truth, some less benign than others. With such a big lunar obstruction in the sky and such rapid orbital motions, eclipses would have been frequent events. A total solar eclipse would have occurred every eighty-four hours at virtually every new Moon, when the Moon was positioned between Earth and the Sun. For some few minutes, sunlight would have been completely blocked, while the stars and planets suddenly popped out against a black sky, and the Moon’s fiery volcanoes and magma oceans stood out starkly red against the black lunar disk. Total lunar eclipses occurred regularly as well, almost every forty-two hours later, like clockwork. During every full Moon, when Earth lies right between the Sun and the Moon, Earth’s big shadow would have completely obscured the giant face of the bright shining Moon. Once again the stars and planets would have suddenly popped out against a black sky, as the Moon’s volcanoes put on their ruddy show. Monster tides were a far more violent consequence of the Moon’s initial proximity. Had both Earth and the Moon been perfectly rigid solid bodies, they would appear today much as they did 4.5 billion years ago: 15,000 miles apart with rapid rotational and orbital motions and frequent eclipses. But Earth and the Moon are not rigid. Their rocks can flex and bend; especially when molten, they swell and recede with the tides. The young Moon, at a distance of 15,000 miles, exerted tremendous tidal forces on Earth’s rocks, even as Earth exerted an equal and opposite gravitational force on the largely molten lunar landscape. It’s difficult to imagine the immense magma tides that resulted. Every few hours Earth’s largely molten rocky surface may have bulged a mile or more outward toward the Moon, generating tremendous internal friction, adding more heat and thus keeping the surface molten far longer than on an isolated planet. And Earth’s gravity returned the favor, bulging the Earth-facing side of the Moon outward, deforming our satellite out of perfect roundness.

It never ceases to amaze me how many Christians, in the North and the South, continue to refer to the former as the “developed” and the latter as the “developing” world. When we in the South use this term to describe ourselves, we are evaluating ourselves by a set of cultural values that are alien to our own cultures, let alone to a Christian world-view! All our normative images and yardsticks of “development” are ideologically loaded. Who dictates that mushrooming TV satellite dishes and skyscrapers are signs of “development”? Who, apart from the automobile industry and the advertising agencies, seriously believes that a country with six-lane highways and multi-story car-parks is more “developed” than one whose chief mode of transport is railways? Does the fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan, New York, than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, mean that human communication is more developed in the former than the latter?

He held up his right hand. On the third finger was another thick gold band. The audience burst into applause and hallelujahs. I kept trying to make sense of it, and kept coming up short. Here were people who routinely used their computers to stay in touch with their friends and get the news of the day, people who took weather satellites and lung transplants for granted, people who expected to live lives thirty and forty years longer than those of their great-grandparents. Here they were, falling for a story that made Santa and the Tooth Fairy look like gritty realism. He was feeding them shit and they were loving it. I had the dismaying idea that he was loving it, too, and that was worse. This was not the man I'd known in Harlow, or the one who had taken me in that night in Tulsa. Although when I thought of how he had treated Cathy Morse's bewildered and brokenhearted farmer father, I had to admit this man had been on the way even then. I don't know if he hates these people, I thought, but he holds them in contempt.

Later, as I reflect on the situation, I realize that if the satellite had in fact hit us, we probably wouldn’t even have known it. When an aircraft flies into a mountain in bad weather, at five hundred miles per hour, there is little left to tell the story of what went wrong: this crash would have taken place at a speed seventy times that. When I used to work on investigations of aircraft mishaps as a Navy test pilot, I would sometimes reflect that a crew might never have known that anything had gone wrong. Misha, Gennady, and I would have gone from grumbling to one another in our cold Soyuz to being blasted in a million directions as diffused atoms, all in the space of a millisecond. Our neurological systems would not even have had time to process the incoming data into conscious thought. The energy involved in a collision between two large objects at 35,000 miles per hour would be similar to that of a nuclear bomb. I think of that time I almost flew an F-14 into the water and would have disappeared without a trace. I don’t know whether this comforts me or disturbs me.

An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between ‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history—and history was thrusting them aside. Europe’s future would look very different—and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten.

Well, let me just end with one last point to do with your question. One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there's been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost―and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about "The End of Socialism," and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, "Yes, it's true, socialism has lost because Russia failed." I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you're not supposed to do in our culture, but let's try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that "socialism" failed, why don't they say that "democracy" failed?―and the proof that "democracy" failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves "democratic"―in fact, they called themselves "People's Democracies," real advanced forms of democracy. So why don't we conclude that "democracy" failed, not just that "socialism" failed? Well, I haven't seen any articles anywhere saying, "Look, democracy failed, let's forget about democracy." And it's obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn't mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right? Okay, then in what sense did socialism fail? I mean, it's true that the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe called themselves "socialist" ―but they also called themselves "democratic." Were they socialist? Well, you can argue about what socialism is, but there are some ideas that are sort of at the core of it, like workers' control over production, elimination of wage labor, things like that. Did those countries have any of those things? They weren't even a thought there. Again, in the pre-Bolshevik part of the Russian Revolution, there were socialist initiatives―but they were crushed instantly after the Bolsheviks took power, like within months. In fact, just as the moves towards democracy in Russia were instantly destroyed, the moves towards socialism were equally instantly destroyed. The Bolshevik takeover was a coup―and that was perfectly well understood at the time, in fact. So if you look in the mainstream of the Marxist movement, Lenin's takeover was regarded as counter-revolutionary; if you look at independent leftists like Bertrand Russell, it was instantly obvious to them; to the libertarian left, it was a truism. But that truism has been driven out of people's heads over the years, as part of a whole prolonged effort to discredit the very idea of socialism by associating it with Soviet totalitarianism. And obviously that effort has been extremely successful―that's why people can tell themselves that socialism failed when they look at what happened to the Soviet Union, and not even see the slightest thing odd about it. And that's been a very valuable propaganda triumph for elites in the West―because it's made it very easy to undercut moves towards real changes in the social system here by saying, "Well, that's socialism―and look what it leads to." Okay, hopefully with the fall of the Soviet Union we can at least begin to get past that barrier, and start recovering an understanding of what socialism could really stand for.

There were also 45 sub-camps at Auschwitz, each of which housed prisoners working at a factory serving a German company, such as Siemens-Schuckert and Krupp. 28 of these camps served companies involved in the armaments industry and the camps housed from several dozen to several thousand prisoners. Among the industries represented at the satellite camps were metal works, foundries and coal mines although prisoners were also made to work at farming and forestry.

In the old days, they didn’t know very much about the world. But they made maps anyway. If they had to map something they couldn’t, they just drew whatever they felt like and wrote, “Here there be dragons.” Someone found this story, once, by asking Google whether dragons are real. If you tried to map the world today, you could detail every inch of the world’s surface. Satellites could show you every forest and every bush, every mountain and every field. They could show you your house and mine. There are no empty spaces left. We don’t know very much about the world; and there are things to map of it besides its surface.   Can broken things be remade? Can destinies change? Is it worth the risk of hope?   Important questions, but one can only shrug, you see.   Here, there be dragons.

Statements like “Our GPS technology allows our driverless lawnmower to be guided by ten different satellites” are going to invite a ton of questions about satellites and robots,

Stamp was also innovative about his assembly line, setting up his factory in Chandler so that the satellites were built horizontally instead of vertically. That meant the assemblers could work at waist level, whereas on military satellites, the technicians stood on ladders and leaned over. He trained Lockheed Martin in the new technique, then later bragged about it to his friends at Khrunichev in Moscow, only to be told, “We’ve done it that way for forty years.

And so, satellite, hunger, stars, kerosene lamps, the Milky Way, the Cultural Revolution’s factional civil wars, a light-year, the flood … these seemingly unconnected things melded together and formed the early part of my life, and also molded the science fiction I write today. As a science fiction writer who began as a fan, I do not use my fiction as a disguised way to criticize the reality of the present. I feel that the greatest appeal of science fiction is the creation of numerous imaginary worlds outside of reality. I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.

The Man Who Ploughed the Sea First published in Satellite, June 1957 Collected in Tales from the White Hart This story was written in Miami, in 1954. Despite the lapse of time, many of the themes of this story are surprisingly up-to-date, and a few years ago I was amazed to read a description in a scientific journal of a ship-borne device to extract uranium from sea water! I sent a copy of the story to the inventors, and apologised for invalidating their patent.

Beyond doubt, I am a splendid fellow. In the autumn, winter and spring, I execute the duties of a student of divinity; in the summer I disguise myself in my skin and become a lifeguard. My slightly narrow and gingerly hirsute but not necessarily unmanly chest becomes brown. My smooth back turns the colour of caramel, which, in conjunction with the whipped cream of my white pith helmet, gives me, some of my teenage satellites assure me, a delightfully edible appearance. My legs, which I myself can study, cocked as they are before me while I repose on my elevated wooden throne, are dyed a lustreless maple walnut that accentuates their articulate strength. Correspondingly, the hairs of my body are bleached blond, so that my legs have the pointed elegance of, within the flower, umber anthers dusted with pollen.

Eisenhower, his science adviser James Killian, and others in the White House didn’t want to be reminded that the rocket was the same damn Jupiter-C that could have placed a satellite in orbit more than a year before Sputnik. The Army was told to keep that information quiet—in fact, to change the name of the rocket, and Jupiter-C became Juno 1.

Along with Lockheed, TRW became the CIA’s principal supplier of Black Satellites.

Chris was told he had been assigned to work in a communications vault that was the nerve center for this system of international espionage—a code room linking the TRW plant with CIA Headquarters and Rhyolite’s major ground stations in Australia. The continuing disclosures about the secret world fascinated Chris, and he was especially intrigued by what he saw as a bizarre contrast between the mechanical spies he had been told about and the location of the ground stations. The Rhyolite earth stations had been planted in a world that was about as close as man could find now to the Stone Age; they were situated near Alice Springs in the harsh Outback of Australia, an oasis in a desert where aborigines still lived much as Stone Age men did thousands of years ago. Under an Executive Agreement between the United States and Australia, Chris was told, all intelligence information collected by the satellites and relayed to the network of dish-shaped microwave antennas at Alice Springs was to be shared with the Australian intelligence service. However, Rogers told Chris, the United States, by design, was not living up to the agreement: certain information was not being passed to Australia. He explained that TRW was designing a new, larger satellite with a new array of sensors; the Australians, Rogers emphasized, were never to be told about it; anytime Chris sent messages that would reach Australia, he must delete any reference to the new satellite. Its name was Argus, or AR—for Advanced Rhyolite. Whoever in the CIA had selected the cryptonym must have enjoyed his choice, because it was appropriate. In Greek mythology, Argus was a giant with one hundred eyes … a vigilant guardian.

A man-made satellite slowly pencils a line through one long passage in the lore of stars, but for those who know the constellation’s stories, nothing can alter them.

A century ago, many Russians lived this way in the Far East, and most natives did, too. Then, there wasn't an alternative, but the expectations for what life can and should be have changed radically in the past twenty years. Under communism, there was room, albeit strictly controlled, for aspiration, and there was a State guarantee of basic security in terms of education, employment. housing, and food. But most of these assurances disintegrated after perestroika. Replacing them, along with crime, alcoholism, and despondency, were satellite dishes offering multiple channels that allowed you to see just how far behind you really were. Nowadays, in many parts of the world-not just Sobolonye-it is possible to starve while watching television.

The list of secrets that, if passed to a foreign power, could bring the death penalty for espionage includes data about nuclear weapons, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, war plans, codes or communications intelligence, major weapons systems, or any “major element of defense strategy.” 30 The Mind of Robert Hanssen Robert Philip Hanssen was a walking paradox—a zealous

I don’t want to write work that is a must-read in May. I don’t want to write work that is a must-read when an auntie is beaten. I don’t want to write work that is a must-read when an auntie is dead. I want to write what white girls write. I want to write about me. I want to write like I’m not just the center of my universe, but the center of yours too: golden and narcissistic and unconcerned. I want to be the center of the universe because I cried; I want these satellites to acknowledge my gravity. I don’t want to tell stories about my people, I want to tell stories about me.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Ronald Blump was struck and killed early this morning by a CNN television satellite that had unexpectedly drifted from its orbit and crashed into the White House Rose Garden, officials from the Secret Service, NASA and McDonald’s Corp. have now confirmed. The 45th president, a frequent and vociferous critic of CNN, was declared dead on arrival at George Washington University Hospital at 9:32 a.m. — as well as 9:38 a.m., 10:12 a.m., 11:01 a.m., and 3:45 p.m. This story will be updated the moment more pieces of the president arrive.

On satellite images of the globe at night, the Baja peninsula is one of the last regions of the world—in a league with the Amazon, Central Africa, and Siberia—that recedes into a blackness as deep and thick as the oceans. The two main exceptions on this thousand-mile strip of mountains and deserts are the light clusters of the Tijuana-to-Ensenada corridor on the north end, and the state capital La Paz and resort towns of Cabo San Lucas on the southern tip. In contrast to the Age of Discovery, however, nowadays the lightless, roadless places of the map are not the lands where monsters lurk. By 2007, the monsters lurked in the cities. (p. 93)

From above—though it would be decades, yet, before satellites and space travel would show the world this way—the Colorado River’s watershed looks like a ragged, many-veined leaf, its stem planted firmly in the Gulf of California. In a wetter climate it might be invisible, hidden by the canopies of trees and overhanging banks of flowers and ferns. But here, in the American Southwest, the river carves and folds the landscape around it as if water holds a weight not measured in ounces. Its headwaters begin in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, a jumbled stretch of the Rocky Mountains, where cold rivulets of snowmelt wake beneath ice each spring to surge into a thunderous rush and pour into the Green River. Jotter and her companions had floated a placid stretch of the Green, 120 miles through the red rock of Utah, where the river loops and doubles back like a dawdling tourist in no hurry to reach the next vista. Earlier that day, they had reached the confluence where the Green joined another tributary known, until not long before, as the Grand. It, too, draws its headwaters from Rocky Mountains west of the Continental Divide. The Grand was shorter than the Green, but it had won the affections of a Colorado congressman named Edward Taylor. In 1921 he successfully lobbied to rename the smaller tributary after its main channel: the Colorado River. “The Grand is the father and the Green the mother, and Colorado wants the name to follow the father,” Taylor said in his persuasive speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, adding as further evidence that the Grand was a much more treacherous river than the Green, killing anyone who tried to raft it.

Mine doesn’t supersede the story of people like you who got left behind by a tech fad that took over everything.

I have put Christ in the centre as my sun, and each science revolves around it like a planet, while minor sciences are satellites to these planets.

Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achieve-ments? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why? We are the first in milk production. We are number one in remote-sensing satellites. We are the second largest producer of wheat. We are the second largest producer of rice. Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred a tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed with the bad news and failures and disasters. I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had a picture of a Jewish gentleman who, in five years, had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news. In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so negative?

Assembled in Gaza from Brazilian bioplastics, Turkish and Indonesian electronics, running Egyptian software and catching its time cues from an Israeli satellite, it commented on the world in ways its producers had failed to consider. “Come to salvation!

we do not know the physics of climate system responses to warming well enough to blame most of the warming on human activities. Human causation is simply assumed. The models are designed with the assumption that the climate system was in natural balance before the Industrial Revolution, despite historical evidence to the contrary. They only produce human-caused climate change because that is the way they are designed. This is in spite of abundant evidence of past warm episodes, such as 1,000- to 2,000-year-old tree stumps being uncovered by receding glaciers; temperature proxy evidence for the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods covering that same time frame; and Arctic sea ice proxy evidence for a natural decrease in sea ice starting well before humans could be blamed. Natural warming since the Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago is simply ignored in the design of climate models, since we do not know what caused it. Simply put, the computerized climate models support human causation of climate change because that’s what they assume from the outset. They are an example of circular reasoning. There is little to no evidence of long-term increases in heat waves, droughts, or floods. Wildfire activity has, if anything, decreased, even though poor land management practices are now making some areas more vulnerable to wildfires even without climate change. Contrary to popular perception and new reports, there is little to no evidence of increased storminess resulting from climate change. This includes tornadoes and hurricanes. Long-term increases in monetary storm damages have indeed occurred, but are due to increasing development, not worsening weather. Sea level has been rising naturally since at least the mid-1800s, well before humans could be blamed. Land subsidence in some areas (e.g. Norfolk, Miami, Galveston-Houston, New Orleans) would result in increasing flooding problems even without any sea-level rise, let alone human-induced sea-level rise causing thermal expansion of the oceans. Some evidence for recent acceleration of sea-level rise might support human causation, but the magnitude of the human component since 1950 has been only 1 inch every 30 years. Ocean acidification is now looking like a non-problem, as the evidence builds that sea life prefers somewhat more CO2, just as vegetation on land does. Given that CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, yet had been at dangerously low levels for thousands of years, the scientific community needs to stop accepting the premise that more CO2 in the atmosphere is necessarily a bad thing. Global greening has been observed by satellites over the last few decades, which is during the period of most rapid rises in atmospheric CO2. The benefits of increasing CO2 to agriculture have been calculated to be in the trillions of dollars. Crop yields continue to break records around the world, due to a combination of human ingenuity and the direct effects of CO2 on plant growth and water use efficiency. Much of this evidence is not known by our citizens, who are largely misinformed by a news media that favors alarmist stories. The scientific community is, in general, biased toward alarmism in order to maintain careers and support desired governmental energy policies. Only when the public becomes informed based upon evidence from both sides of the debate can we expect to make rational policy decisions. I hope my brief treatment of these subjects provides a step in that direction. THE END

Modern satellite data . . . suggest that the number [of planets capable of supporting intelligent life] should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves. In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so. . . . . Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts. There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction. We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.

Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to. Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it. These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself.

Our solar system, in turn, is just one tiny corner of the Milky Way galaxy, that thick band of stars visible in the darkest night skies stretching far over our heads. We’re about 25,000 light-years away from the center of the rotating galaxy, which astronomers estimate contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars—and at least that number of planets—and stretches across some 87,400 light-years. What we see in our skies from Earth is the equivalent of staring at the side of the Milky Way stretching off before us, as if we’re looking at the edge of a plate or a Frisbee. It is spiral-shaped, like an enormous spinning pinwheel, first mentioned, as far as we know, by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in AD 964, recorded in his The Book of the Fixed Stars. In 1610, Galileo was the first astronomer to piece together, using a telescope, that the Milky Way visible in our skies was a collection of faint stars; a century later, Immanuel Kant surmised that it was a rotating body of stars, and over the next two hundred years, astronomers came to begin to grasp how enormous the universe truly is. Now we understand that our Milky Way is about 2.5 million light-years from the next closest galaxy, known as Andromeda. Together, these two massive galaxies—and all the stuff in between them, including a number of so-called dwarf galaxies and satellite galaxies, as well as a third large galaxy known as Triangulum—make up what astronomers call the “Local Group,” which is one corner of a larger cosmic structure known as a “supercluster.”II For most of the last fifty years, our particular galactic neighborhood was believed to be part of the “Virgo Supercluster,” a gathering of about one hundred galaxies, but in 2014 a team of astronomers led by Hawaii’s R. Brent Tully realized we were more connected to our neighbors than anyone had realized; they redrew the boundaries of the galactic map after realizing that our supercluster was far more vast and in fact consisted of what had been four separate superclusters that all moved in the same gravitational rhythm. They dubbed the new supercluster “Laniakea,” Hawaiian for “immense heaven,” and we now believe it encompasses about one hundred thousand other galaxies that astronomers define as “nearby,” despite the fact that they stretch across more than 520 million light-years of outer space. Laniakea, in turn, is now understood to be part of the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, an enormous structure of about sixty superclusters that together stretch across a billion light-years. The Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex is what’s known as a “galaxy filament,” the largest structures known to exist in our universe, in which NASA now estimates there are about 200 billion galaxies stretching across 46 billion light-years.III (Each of those galaxies is estimated to have perhaps 100 million stars—although the largest, known as supergiants, can contain 100 trillion.)

A cavalry scout is generally thought to function as the eyes and ears of a commander during battle. But in fact, a scout’s role extends quite a bit further. We refer to ourselves as “jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none,” and we are trained to have a working familiarity with—quite literally—every job in the army. We are experts in reconnaissance, countersurveillance, and navigation, but we’re also extremely comfortable with all aspects of radio and satellite communications. We know how to assemble and deploy three-man hunter/killer teams. We’re pretty good at blowing things up using mines and high explosives. We can function as medics, vehicle mechanics, and combat engineers. And we have a thorough understanding of every single weapons system, from a 9-mm handgun to a 120-mm howitzer.