Velocity Escape Quotes

Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.

Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.

I need anything, anything that will stop me from living in the kind of death the bourgeois eat, the death called comfort.

He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for.

In order to achieve escape velocity, we must learn to keep our own counsel, to move silently among doubters, to voice our plans only among our allies, and to name our allies accurately.

Well, at least we were getting the good night’s sleep,’ Franz said, cheerfully. ‘I’d hardly call being knocked unconscious with sedative gas a good night’s sleep,’ Nigel said, frowning.

To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her. A moment after he

So you have put yourself through all of this just so that you can cheat in an exam,’ Wing said with a slight smile. ‘An exam, I might add, that you would almost certainly have passed with flying colours anyway.’ ‘Well, it’s the principle of the thing,’ Otto replied with a grin. ‘I am not sure that I approve,’ Wing said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Cheats never prosper.’ ‘You know, sometimes I really think that you might not be cut out for this place,’ Otto said. ‘I take it then that you won’t be needing a copy?’ ‘Well,’ Wing replied, ‘I perhaps wouldn’t go so far as to say that –

That’s it,’ Shelby said as they ran along behind Raven. ‘From now on no one’s dead until I read the autopsy report.’ ‘Such a report could be faked,’ Wing observed. ‘Hey, only people who haven’t come back from the grave get to have an opinion,’ Shelby said quickly. ‘So that counts you out, zombie boy.’ ‘Strictly speaking I am not a zombie since I did not actually die,’ Wing said. As usual it was impossible to tell if he was joking or not.

So what have you done this time, Malpense?’ Otto smiled as he heard the familiar soft Scottish accent of Laura Brand behind him. He turned to face her and returned her wry, lopsided smile. ‘What on earth could you possibly mean?’ he replied with a look of wounded innocence. ‘Well, a full-school assembly usually means that something has gone really horribly wrong and I find it hard to believe that you’re not involved if that’s the case,’ she grinned. ‘So, come on, spill it.

One of the favorite speakers was a man in red who warned of sickle-cell anemia, 'a deadly organism lurking in all nigger blood.' 'If so much as one drop of nigger blood gets in your baby’s cereal,' he said, 'the baby will surely die in one year.' He did not explain how he thought a negro would come to bleed in anyone’s cereal.

A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.

To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her.

I like to equate the mediocrity of everyday matters with the force of gravity. It pulls you downwards. For wisdom to be obtained, the escape velocity must be reached and maintained.

There’s more than one way to sneak into a place, you know,’ Otto said, pulling his Blackbox out of his pocket and passing it to Laura. Laura glanced at the display, her eyes widening in shock. ‘That’s impossible,’ she whispered, not taking her eyes off the screen. ‘Apparently not,’ Otto said with a sly grin. ‘Want a copy?’ ‘That would be cheating,’ Laura replied, handing the Blackbox back to Otto. ‘Of course I want a copy.’ ‘A copy of what?’ Shelby said impatiently, trying and failing to grab the PDA from Otto. ‘Next week’s exam,’ Otto said quietly. ‘But I’m sure you’ll just be able to sneak in and steal one, what with you being so stealthy . . .’ Shelby looked half annoyed and half impressed. ‘How much?’ she said with a smile. ‘Well, there are a couple of things in the Science and Technology centre that I might like to borrow for a while,’ Otto replied. ‘I am surrounded by people of low moral character,’ Wing sighed.

The thing that made space flight difficult was the thing that, to my grandfather, made it beautiful: To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave

Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse—constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. However

Heisenberg had understood that you can't locate a particle at a point in space for long: it soon escapes. The smaller the region where we try to locate a particle, the greater the velocity at which it escapes.

But imagine this, for a moment. If an asteroid happened to hit one of the rare remaining older surfaces; if its strike were glancing enough that it didn’t pulverise the surface, but forceful enough that it ejected a chunk of rock with an escape velocity of 12,000 mph; if that chunk, flung out into space, wandered aimlessly for a million years or two before feeling the gravitational tug of a nearby planet; if it tore through the atmosphere of that planet in a blaze of glory and landed on one of the planet’s frozen ice caps; if the chunk was buried in snow, squeezed, shoved and harried until it re-emerged, blinking, into the strangely blue daylight; and if, tens of thousands of years later a few local bipeds happened upon it, might it contain signs of alien life? If so, it would surely become one of the most exciting pieces of real estate in the entire Solar System.

I was leaving this small Arizona town in a few weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out into a strange and sparkling universe.

I there first felt the impact of time, the force that was pushing me toward forty, the velocity with which life was consumed, the concreteness of the exposure to death: If it's happening to her, I thought, there's no escape, it will happen to me as well.

The event horizon is the point at which the speed required to leave the vicinity of the black hole (the escape velocity) is the speed of light, and because Einstein’s theory tells us that no material object can reach that speed, nothing can escape from within the event horizon.

A measure of the strength of a body's gravity is the speed with which a projectile must be fired to escape its grasp. It takes 11.2 kilometers per second to escape from the Earth. This speed is tiny compared with that of light, 300,000 kilometers per second, but it challenges rocket engineers constrained to use chemical fuel, which converts only a billionth of its so-called mass 'rest-mass energy' (Einstein's mc^2) into effective power. The escape velocity from the sun's surface is 600 kilometers per second-still only one fifth of one percent of the speed of light.

The official record for the fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. But it’s possible the actual holder of that title is a two-ton metal manhole cover. The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the 1-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished—which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found. Now, 66 km/s is about six times escape velocity, but contrary to common speculation, it’s unlikely the cap ever reached space. Newton’s impact depth approximation suggests that it was either destroyed completely by impact with the air or slowed and fell back to Earth. When we turn it back on, our reactivated hair dryer box, bobbing in lake water, undergoes a similar process. The heated steam below it expands outward, and as the box rises into the air, the entire surface of the lake turns to steam. The steam, heated to a plasma by the flood of radiation, accelerates the box faster and faster. Photo courtesy of Commander Hadfield Rather than slam into the atmosphere like the manhole cover, the box flies through a bubble of expanding plasma that offers little resistance. It exits the atmosphere and continues away, slowly fading from second sun to dim star. Much of the Northwest Territories is burning, but the Earth has survived.

Now I remember, this happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult the rewards will be great. Exercise your human mind as fully as possible knowing that it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the senses, filled with joy and sorrow and laughter, empathy, compassion, and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag. I remember where I came from, and how I became human, why I hung around, and now my final departure's scheduled. This way out, escaping velocity. Not just eternity, but Infinity.

Theseus Within the Labyrinth pt.2 But nobody like Theseus likes a smart girl, always telling him to dress warmly and eat plenty of fiber. She was one of those people who are never in doubt. Had he sharpened his sword, tied his sandals? Without her, of course, he would have never escaped the labyrinth. Why hadn’t he thought of that trick with the ball of yarn? But as he looked down at her sleeping form, this woman who was already carrying his child, maybe he thought of their future together, how she would correctly foretell the mystery or banality behind each locked door. So probably he shook his head and said, Give me a dumb girl any day, and crept back to his ship and sailed away. Of course Ariadne was revenged. She would have told him to change the sails, to take down the black ones, put up the white. She would have reminded him that his father, the king of Athens, was waiting on a high cliff scanning the Aegean for Theseus’s returning ship, white for victory, black for defeat. She would have said how his father would see the black sails, how the grief for the supposed death of his one son would destroy him. But Theseus and his men had brought out the wine and were cruising a calm sea in a small boat filled to the brim with ex-virgins. Who could have blamed him? Until he heard the distant scream and his head shot up to see the black sails and he knew. The girls disappeared, the ship grew quiet except for the lap-lap of the water. Staring toward the spot where his father had tumbled headfirst into the Aegean, Theseus understood he would always be a stupid man with a thick stick, scratching his forehead long after the big event. But think, does he change his mind, turn back the ship, hunt up Ariadne and beg her pardon? Far better to be stupid by himself than smart because she’d been tugging on his arm; better to live in the eternal present with a boatload of ex-virgins than in that dark land of consequences promised by Ariadne, better to live like any one of us, thinking to outwit the darkness, but knowing it will catch us, that we will be surprised like the Minotaur on his couch when the door slams back and the hired gun of our personal destruction bursts upon us, upsetting the good times and scaring the girls. Better to be ignorant, to go into the future as into a long tunnel, without ball of yarn or clear direction, to tiptoe forward like any fool or saint or hero, jumpy, full of second thoughts, and bravely unprepared.

Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real. However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the 2000s, leaving Earth orbit in the 2010s—libertarianism became a right-wing movement. (Also helpful was the fact that extreme economic libertarians included extremely rich people like the Koch brothers who could finance its spread.) Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. It’s a political movement whose most widely read and influential texts are fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.

Theseus Within the Labyrinth pt.1 The lives of Greeks in the old days were deep, mysterious and often lead to questions like just what was wrong with Ariadne anyway, that’s what I’d like to know? She would have done anything for that rascally Theseus, and what did he do but sneak out in the night and row back to his ship with black sails. Let’s get the heck out of here, he muttered to his crew and they leaned on their oars as he went whack- whack on the whacking board—a human metronome of adventure and ill-fortune. She was King Minos’s daughter and had helped Theseus kill the king’s pet monster, her half-brother, so possibly he didn’t like feeling beholden—people might think he wasn’t tough. But certainly he’d spent his life knocking chips off shoulders and flattening any fellow reckless enough to step across a line drawn in the dust. If you wanted a punch thrown, Theseus was just the cowboy to throw it. I’m only happy when hitting and scratching, he’d told Ariadne that first night. So he’d been the logical choice to sail down from Athens to Crete to stop this nonsense of a tribute of virgins for some monster to eat. Those Cretans called it eating but Theseus thought himself no fool and liked a virgin as well as the next man. Not that he could have got into the Labyrinth without Ariadne’s help or out either for that matter. As for the Minotaur, lounging on his couch, nibbling grapes and sipping wine, while a troop of ex-virgins fluttered to his beck and call, Theseus must have scared the horns right off him, slamming back the door and standing there in his lion skin suit and waving that ugly club. The poor beast might have had a stroke had there been time before Theseus pummelled him into the earth. Then, with Ariadne’s help, Theseus escaped, and soon after he ditched her on an island and sailed off in his ship with black sails, which returns us to the question: Just what was wrong with Ariadne anyway?

You!’ the first guard yelled. ‘Hands on your head, don’t move.’ Wing slowly put his hands on his head, showing no hint of emotion. ‘What the hell?’ the other guard said. ‘He’s just a kid.’ He pulled a pair of handcuffs from his belt and slowly moved behind Wing and grasped one of his wrists. In one fluid motion, Wing grabbed the guard’s own wrist with his free hand and twisted hard. There was a sickening crunch, the guard howling in pain as Wing stepped backwards, too close for the man to bring his gun to bear. He pulled the guard’s wounded arm further over his own shoulder, dragging the man closer, and jerked his head backwards, his skull connecting with the man’s nose with a crunch. Wing rotated around the guard, pressing the wounded arm up into the small of the man’s back and ducking behind him, giving the other guard no clean shot without hitting his associate. He pushed hard, sending the stunned guard staggering towards his partner, and delivered a sharp kick to the base of his spine. The wounded guard’s momentum sent him careering into the other man, yowling with pain and confusion. Wing took two short steps and in a blur of movement pulled the handcuffs from the wounded man’s belt and snapped them closed around both his broken wrist and the wrist of the unwounded guard’s gun hand. Wing pressed his fingers into the pressure point behind the wounded guard’s ear and he collapsed, instantly unconscious, pulling the other guard down with him and pinning his gun to the ground. The conscious guard snatched for the gun with his free hand, but Wing dropped on to him, his knee pressing into his throat hard enough to choke him but without crushing his windpipe. Wing delivered a sharp knuckle jab to the guard’s shoulder and his free arm was instantly disabled too. Wing could hear the sound of at least half a dozen more guards racing up the stairs from below. He knew there would be more than he could handle. He reached down and took a smoke grenade from the webbing on the pinned guard’s chest and pulled the pin with his teeth, tossing it through the doorway into the stairwell. There were cries of confusion from just below as the confined space filled with impenetrable clouds of white smoke. Wing pulled a flashbang stun grenade from the other side of the pinned guard’s webbing and waited a couple of seconds before tossing it into the stairwell too. He closed his eyes, the flash of the grenade clear even through his eyelids. ‘Who the hell are you?’ the guard pinned beneath Wing gasped. ‘Just a kid,’ Wing said with a slight smile and punched him unconscious.

Dr. Ross told me that when it comes to people there are basically two extremes and then everyone else in the middle. He said that the two extremes – in astrological terms – are like black holes and supernova. A black hole is so dense (has so much gravity) that the speed required to escape the gravitational pull of the star (escape velocity) is in excess of the speed of light. Therefore no light can escape it. On the other side of the spectrum is the supernova. A supernova is created when the core of a massive star collapses. This sudden collapse causes the star to lose equilibrium and explode. So in other words, a black hole keeps all the light and good stuff in while a supernova explodes and lets everything out. It provides intense light and all the building blocks for life in the universe. All the stuff that is necessary for the formation of new stars and planets like the one we inhabit. The supernova is much like the mythical Phoenix – hope rising up out of the ashes.

The official record for the fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. But it’s possible the actual holder of that title is a two-ton metal manhole cover. The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the 1-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished—which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found. Now, 66 km/s is about six times escape velocity, but contrary to common speculation, it’s unlikely the cap ever reached space. Newton’s impact depth approximation suggests that it was either destroyed completely by impact with the air or slowed and fell back to Earth.

Nature did not need to know anything about escape velocity in order to master it.

It’s likely [that we’re] just another ten to twelve years away from the point that the general public will hit longevity escape velocity.

Now if we map the three horizons onto the Growth/Materiality Matrix, we can see how they intersect with portfolio management (see Figure 2.5).

If religion is the opiate of the masses and Marxism the opiate of the intellectual, then cyberspace is the opiate of the twenty-first-century schizoid man, polarized between mind and body.

It's likely [that we're] just another ten to twelve years away from the point that the general public will hit longevity escape velocity.

Riding a motorcycle is velocity as poetry. The fine balance between elegant agility and fatal fall is a kind of truth, and like all truth, it carries a heartbeat with it into the sky. Eternal moments in the saddle escape the stuttering flow of time, and space, and purpose. Coursing on those wheels, on that river of air, in that flight of freed spirit there’s no attachment, no fear, no joy, no hatred, no love, and no malice: the nearest thing, for some violent men, for this violent man, to a state of grace.

KARMA IS LIKE THE ESCAPE VELOCITY, GOOD THE KARMA BIGGER IS THE FORCE

NOTHING CAN GO FASTER THAN LIGHT Of course the idea that there is an ultimate speed limit seems absurd. While the speed of light is very high by earthly standards, the magnitude is not the point; any kind of speed limit in nature doesn't make sense. Suppose, for example, that a spaceship is traveling at almost the speed of light. Why can't you fire the engine again and make it go faster-or if necessary, build another ship with a more powerful engine? Or if a proton is whirling around in a cyclotron at close to the speed of light, why can't you give it additional energy boosts and make it go faster? Intuitive explanation. When we think of the spaceship and the proton as made of fields, not as solid objects, the idea is no longer ridiculous. Fields can't move infinitely fast. Changes in a field propagate in a "laborious" manner, with a change in intensity at one point causing a change at nearby points, in accordance with the field equations. Consider the wave created when you drop a stone in water: The stone generates a disturbance that moves outward as the water level at one point affects the level at another point, and there is nothing we can do to speed it up. Or consider a sound wave traveling through air: The disturbance in air pressure propagates as the pressure at one point affects the pressure at an adjacent point, and we can't do anything to speed it up. In both cases the speed of travel is determined by properties of the transmitting medium- air and water, and there are mathematical equations that describe those properties. Fields are also described by mathematical equations, based on the properties of space. It is the constant c in those equations that determines the maximum speed of propagation. If the field has mass, there is also a mass term that slows down the propagation speed further. Since everything is made of fields - including protons and rocketships - it is clear that nothing can go faster than light. As Frank Wilczek wrote, One of the most basic results of special relativity, that the speed of light is a limiting velocity for the propagation of any physical influence, makes the field concept almost inevitable. - F. Wilczek ("The persistence of Ether", p. 11, Physics Today, Jan. 1999) David Bodanis tried to make this point in the following way: Light will always be a quick leapfrogging of electricity out from magnetism, and then of magnetism leaping out from electricity, all swiftly shooting away from anything trying to catch up to it. That's why it's speed can be an upper limit - D. Bodanis However, Bodanis only told part of the story. It is only when we recognize that everything, not just light, is made of fields that we can conclude that there is a universal speed limit.

NOTHING CAN GO FASTER THAN LIGHT Of course the idea that there is an ultimate speed of light is very high by earthly standards, the magnitude is not the point; any kind of speed limit in nature doesn't make sense. Suppose, for example, that a spaceship is traveling at almost the speed of light. Why can't you fire the engine again and make it go faster-or if necessary, build another ship with a more powerful engine? Or if a proton is whirling around in a cyclotron at close to the speed of light, why can't you give it additional energy boosts and make it go faster? Intuitive explanation. When we think of the spaceship and the proton as made of fields, not as solid objects, the idea is no longer ridiculous. Fields can't move infinitely fast. Changes in a field propagate in a "laborious" manner, with a change in intensity at one point causing a change at nearby points, in accordance with the field equations. Consider the wave created when you drop a stone in water: The stone generates a disturbance that moves outward as the water level at one point affects the level at another point, and there is nothing we can do to speed it up. Or consider a sound wave traveling through air: The disturbance in air pressure propagates as the pressure at one point affects the pressure at an adjacent point, and we can't do anything to speed it up. In both cases the speed of travel is determined by properties of the transmitting medium- air and water, and there are mathematical equations that describe those properties. Fields are also described by mathematical equations, based on the properties of space. It is the constant c in those equations that determines the maximum speed of propagation. If the field has mass, there is also a mass term that slows down the propagation speed further. Since everything is made of fields - including protons and rocketships - it is clear that nothing can go faster than light. As Frank Wilczek wrote, One of the most basic results of special relativity, that the speed of light is a limiting velocity for the propagation of any physical influence, makes the field concept almost inevitable. - F. Wilczek ("The persistence of Ether", p. 11, Physics Today, Jan. 1999) David Bodanis tried to make this point in the following way: Light will always be a quick leapfrogging of electricity out from magnetism, and then of magnetism leaping out from electricity, all swiftly shooting away from anything trying to catch up to it. That's why it's speed can be an upper limit - D. Bodanis However, Bodanis only told part of the story. It is only when we recognize that everything, not just light, is made of fields that we can conclude that there is a universal speed limit.

Bound by the speed of light and the velocity of nerve impulses, our perceptions of the present sketch the world as it was an instant ago—for all that our consciousness pretends otherwise, we can never catch up. Even in principle, perfect synchronicity escapes us.

And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Riding a motorcycle is velocity as poetry. The fine balance between elegant agility and fatal fall is a kind of truth, and like all truth, it carries a heartbeat with it into the sky. Eternal moments in the saddle escape the stuttering flow of time, and space, and purpose. Coursing on those wheels, on that river of air, in that flight of freed spirit there’s no attachment, no fear, no joy, no hatred, no love, and no malice: the nearest thing, for some violent men, for this violent man, to a state of grace.

The writing inside the two manuscripts seemed to escape all traditions and forms with such velocity and horrible beauty I couldn’t breathe.

At incredible velocity and accelerating exponentially, the concentrated volume of quintessence escaped, transforming as it did so into a state known as phantom energy and following the artificial line of egress that had been provided.

Let's return to Archytas's staff and to the expanding Universe. A javelin that is thrown straight upward will drop back down a long time before we can sensibly ask the question about the edge of the universe. The javelin cannot escape the gravity of Earth. A spacecraft that runs out of propellant only after it reaches the velocity that permits escape from the gravitational pull of our solar system will continue on its path, but it will remain inside our galaxy. The Milky Way's gravitational field holds onto it. Proceeding like this, we pass, from a practical problem to a fundamental question. Can there be objects that may escape our group of galaxies and that will ultimately leave our universe altogether? The answer must be no. The universe, after all, keeps expanding. Light that reaches us today was emitted shortly after the birth of the universe; its headwaters are moving away from us with a velocity close to that of light. There is no light older than what originated at the time of the Big Bang. Since no information travels at a speed greater than that of light, the observable universe is contained within the surface of a sphere with a radius defined by the distance traveled by light that was emitted at the time of the Big Bang.

In order to show that not even light can escape from the gravitational pull of a black hole, we have to hone the argument further. Light, as we know, always moves at the same velocity. When it rises against gravity, light, will therefore not slow down. Unlike a bullet, it cannot come to rest and turn around. But by rising it will lose energy and thereby its wavelength will increase. Thus the light becomes dimmer and dimmer-with the result that outside the sphere at which bullets turn around the light cannot be seen anymore. We may therefore conclude that light, just as bullets, cannot leave the gravitational field of a black hole.

It is not only the theory of inflation that tells us we don't know all of the masses in the universe. In addition, there are observed facts that tell us the same. One of these is the chaotic motion of galaxies inside galaxy clusters. Galaxies don't appear singly, but rather inside such larger groupings. They are kept from escaping by the gravitational pull of the mass of the cluster. Individual galaxies move inside a cluster with velocities that are measurable by means of the Doppler effect. That's how we know these velocities to be so large that the gravity of the visible mass of the cluster does not suffices to hold the galaxies it contains together: Were there only the cluster's visible mass, its galaxies would have had to fly apart long ago. To keep all of them within the cluster, there must be about one hundred times more mass present than what is noticeable to us as visible matter.

I’ll tell you what makes me optimistic, is that this country is still full of people who just didn’t get the word. And they are starting things and inventing things and creating things and organizing things. If you want to be an optimist about America, stand on your head. You look at this country from the bottom up. You see the potential. We’re like a space shuttle, all that thrust coming from below. But right now the booster rocket, Washington, D.C., is cracked and leaking energy. And the pilots in the cockpit are fighting over the flight plan. So we can’t achieve the escape velocity we need now to get to the next level. You fix those things, we take off.

Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real. However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the 2000s, leaving Earth orbit in the 2010s—libertarianism became a right-wing movement. (Also helpful was the fact that extreme economic libertarians included extremely rich people like the Koch brothers who could finance its spread.) Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism.

The other question to ask is, if a user wants to reactivate, how hard is it? At Uber, we had a staggering statistic where several million users were failing their password recovery per week—how do you make this much easier, and treat reactivation with the same seriousness as the sign-up process? While reactivation is typically not a concern for new products—they should focus on new users, since their count of lapsed users won’t be large—for products that have hit Escape Velocity, there will be a pool of many millions of users to draw upon. Reengaging them can become as big a growth lever as acquiring new users.

The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.84 Because Buffett generally invests in low-tech companies like See’s Candies or Coca-Cola, the moat he refers to is often a strong brand or a unique business model. For software products with network effects, a strong moat means something different: how much effort, time, and capital does it take to replicate a product’s features and its network? In the modern era, cloning software features is usually not the hard part—replicating the complete functionality of a Slack or Airbnb might take time, but it is tractable. It’s the difficulty of cloning their network that makes these types of products highly defensible. I’ll use an example to think through the competitive moat. Let’s start from first principles, with an example of Airbnb trying to launch in a new city with no competitors in sight. As the early Airbnb team described, the Cold Start Problem lies in the difficulty of launching a new city to a Tipping Point of over 300 listings with 100 reviews. This requires real effort, because the minimum network size is quite large—contrasted to many other network types like communication apps, which might only require two or three people to get started. But once Airbnb has reached Escape Velocity in a market, the Cold Start Problem creates the defense against new entrants.

Humanity’s escape was a five-step process. First, the Earth Engines would generate thrust in the opposite direction of the Earth’s movement, halting its rotation. Second, operating at full capacity, the engines would accelerate the Earth until it reached escape velocity, flinging it from the solar system. Third, the Earth would continue to accelerate as it flew through outer space toward Proxima Centauri. Fourth, the engines would reverse direction, restarting the Earth’s rotation and decelerating gradually. Fifth, the Earth would enter into orbit around Proxima Centauri, becoming its satellite. People called these five steps the ‘Braking Era’, the ‘Deserting Era’, the ‘First Wandering Era’ (during acceleration), the ‘Second Wandering Era’ (during deceleration), and the ‘Neosolar Era’. The entire migration process was projected to last 2,500 years, over one hundred generations.

You may not know what cerebral atrophy is, you may not know what entropy is, you may not know what escape velocity is. If you could just know to lend a hand to someone in misery, that is enough.

In my experience, most sales shortfalls reflect either an inadequate product or a disconnect between the product and the target market. In other words, what you're offering doesn't resonate with the people you expected to like it. A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.

TLI was what made this flight different from the six Mercury, ten Gemini, and one Apollo flights that had preceded it, different from any trip man had ever made in any vehicle. For the first time in history, man was going to propel himself past escape velocity, breaking the clutch of our earth's gravitational field and coasting into outer space as he had never done before. After TLI there would be three men in the solar system who would have to be counted apart from all the other billions, three who were in a different place, whose motion obeyed difterent rules, and whose habitat had to be considered a separate planet. The three could examine the earth and the earth could examine them, and each would see the other for the first time.

Aging’s Escape Velocity and the Rabbit Imagine a sign far off in the future with a number on it that represents the age of your death. Every year that you live, you advance closer to the sign. When you reach the sign, you die. Now imagine a rabbit holding the sign and walking to the future. Every year that you live, the rabbit is half a year as far away. After a while, you will reach the rabbit and die. But what if the rabbit could walk at a pace of one year for every year of your life? You would never be able to catch the rabbit, and therefore you would never die. The speed at which the rabbit walks to the future is our technology. The more we advance technology and knowledge of our bodies, the faster we can make the rabbit walk. Aging’s escape velocity is the moment at which the rabbit walks at a pace of one year per year or faster, and we become immortal.

A few strands of dark hair floated around her face, escaped from his braid, but the five-point restraints kept her firmly in her seat as the shuttle Leonard Cohen matched velocities with the starship and drifted into position along her central axis.

Even as PayPal was zooming out of the gate, there was no point at which the company could rest easy. Escape velocity is not a fixed speed. It’s always relative to competition. Your fastest competitor determines how hard you hit the gas. And PayPal had a fierce competitor in eBay, which was itself rolling out a new online payment system.

achieve escape velocity in order to break free the dense gravity field of matter and form.

Longevity escape velocity(LEV) is a hypothetical situation in which one's remaining life expectancy (not LE at birth) is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which LEV would be maintained, technological advances would increase people's remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by. From Aubrey De Grey, the founder of LEV foundation himself: "My current estimate is that we will reach LEV, which is tantamount to defeating aging completely, within 12–15 years with 50% probability." "David Sinclair and I both made important contributions to the field 20-25 years ago, which gave us the option to get the media interested in us, and we chose to exercise that option because, and this may shock you, we are not scientists first and foremost, but humanitarians. We view the quest to understand aging better as a means to an end, namely to postpone the ILL-HEALTH of old age as much as possible, thereby saving lives and alleviating suffering on a totally unprecedented scale. When you ask how well respected David is as a scientist, you're actually (unintentionally, to be sure) asking a rather loaded question. Like me, he has chosen to sacrifice some of the respect he could have had, simply in order to save more lives." "I've often been asked what the life expectancy will be in the year 3000. My answer is there very (and I mean VERY) probably won’t be one. Obviously there won’t be one if the human race has ceased to exist, which quite a few people think is quite likely, but discounting that, in addressing the question we need to start by understanding what the term “life expectancy” actually means when it is applied to humans. My full answer to this here: quora .com/What-will-be-the-life-expectancy-in-the-year-3000 So the question now is “how would it work in practice?" Say you are 60 years old at the time of the first intervention and that this early and fundamentally imperfect treatment repairs 75% of the accumulated damage and winds the clock back by 25 years. Then 10 years later you would reach the chronological age of 70 but would be biologically only 45 years old and look and feel like a 45 year old. We now come to the vital key to the whole theory which is this, let's say 20 years after the first treatment, when you are chronologically 80 but biologically 55 years old, both your doctor and yourself will realize that the damage that was not repaired in the first treatment combined with the further damage accumulated over the 20 years since is again posing a health risk. At this point it is time for another intervention. It is now that the progress in medicine comes into play because, by the time 20 years has gone by, anti-aging medicine will have progressed significantly and, whilst the first treatment bought you an extra 25 or 30 years by repairing a fair amount of the damage accumulated over your first 60 years, it did not repair it all. 20 years later medical progress will mean that the latest treatment can not only repair all of the damage corrected by the first intervention but also some of the damage that was not able to be repaired 20 years earlier so in essence you are now chronologically 80 (but biologically in your 50s). This means that, whilst you will have aged 20 years chronologically you will be biologically younger after the second intervention than you were after the first. This is the essence of ADGs theory and pretty much any other theory based on rejuvenation and damage repair, essentially, it's a shortcut to radical life extension. It is not a cure but it acknowledges that it does not need to be because it simply buys time and leads to a situation where regular interventions at say 15/20 year intervals with increasing effective treatments could extend life virtually indefinitely. Will it happen? At this point, there is no doubt that it will happen eventually. It's not a question of if but when.

P1 - Longevity escape velocity(LEV) is a hypothetical situation in which one's remaining life expectancy (not LE at birth) is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which LEV would be maintained, technological advances would increase people's remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by. From Aubrey De Grey, the founder of LEV foundation himself: "My current estimate is that we will reach LEV, which is tantamount to defeating aging completely, within 12–15 years with 50% probability." "David Sinclair and I both made important contributions to the field 20-25 years ago, which gave us the option to get the media interested in us, and we chose to exercise that option because, and this may shock you, we are not scientists first and foremost, but humanitarians. We view the quest to understand aging better as a means to an end, namely to postpone the ILL-HEALTH of old age as much as possible, thereby saving lives and alleviating suffering on a totally unprecedented scale. When you ask how well respected David is as a scientist, you're actually (unintentionally, to be sure) asking a rather loaded question. Like me, he has chosen to sacrifice some of the respect he could have had, simply in order to save more lives." "I've often been asked what the life expectancy will be in the year 3000. My answer is there very (and I mean VERY) probably won’t be one. Obviously there won’t be one if the human race has ceased to exist, which quite a few people think is quite likely, but discounting that, in addressing the question we need to start by understanding what the term “life expectancy” actually means when it is applied to humans. My full answer to this here: quora .com/What-will-be-the-life-expectancy-in-the-year-3000 So the question now is “how would it work in practice?" Say you are 60 years old at the time of the first intervention and that this early and fundamentally imperfect treatment repairs 75% of the accumulated damage and winds the clock back by 25 years. Then 10 years later you would reach the chronological age of 70 but would be biologically only 45 years old and look and feel like a 45 year old. We now come to the vital key to the whole theory which is this, let's say 20 years after the first treatment, when you are chronologically 80 but biologically 55 years old, both your doctor and yourself will realize that the damage that was not repaired in the first treatment combined with the further damage accumulated over the 20 years since is again posing a health risk. At this point it is time for another intervention. It is now that the progress in medicine comes into play because, by the time 20 years has gone by, anti-aging medicine will have progressed significantly and, whilst the first treatment bought you an extra 25 or 30 years by repairing a fair amount of the damage accumulated over your first 60 years, it did not repair it all. 20 years later medical progress will mean that the latest treatment can not only repair all of the damage corrected by the first intervention but also some of the damage that was not able to be repaired 20 years earlier so in essence you are now chronologically 80 (but biologically in your 50s). This means that, whilst you will have aged 20 years chronologically you will be biologically younger after the second intervention than you were after the first. This is the essence of ADGs theory and pretty much any other theory based on rejuvenation and damage repair, essentially, it's a shortcut to radical life extension. It is not a cure but it acknowledges that it does not need to be because it simply buys time and leads to a situation where regular interventions at say 15/20 year intervals with increasing effective treatments could extend life virtually indefinitely. Will it happen? At this point, there is no doubt that it will happen eventually. It's not a question of if but when.

Longevity escape velocity(LEV) is a hypothetical situation in which one's remaining life expectancy (not LE at birth) is extended longer than the time that is passing. For example, in a given year in which LEV would be maintained, technological advances would increase people's remaining life expectancy more than the year that just went by. From Aubrey De Grey, the founder of LEV foundation himself: "My current estimate is that we will reach LEV, which is tantamount to defeating aging completely, within 12–15 years with 50% probability." "David Sinclair and I both made important contributions to the field 20-25 years ago, which gave us the option to get the media interested in us, and we chose to exercise that option because, and this may shock you, we are not scientists first and foremost, but humanitarians. We view the quest to understand aging better as a means to an end, namely to postpone the ILL-HEALTH of old age as much as possible, thereby saving lives and alleviating suffering on a totally unprecedented scale. When you ask how well respected David is as a scientist, you're actually (unintentionally, to be sure) asking a rather loaded question. Like me, he has chosen to sacrifice some of the respect he could have had, simply in order to save more lives." "I've often been asked what the life expectancy will be in the year 3000. My answer is there very (and I mean VERY) probably won’t be one. Obviously there won’t be one if the human race has ceased to exist, which quite a few people think is quite likely, but discounting that, in addressing the question we need to start by understanding what the term “life expectancy” actually means when it is applied to humans. My full answer to this here: quora .com/What-will-be-the-life-expectancy-in-the-year-3000 So the question now is “how would it work in practice?" Say you are 60 years old at the time of the first intervention and that this early and fundamentally imperfect treatment repairs 75% of the accumulated damage and winds the clock back by 25 years. Then 10 years later you would reach the chronological age of 70 but would be biologically only 45 years old and look and feel like a 45 year old. We now come to the vital key to the whole theory which is this, let's say 20 years after the first treatment, when you are chronologically 80 but biologically 55 years old, both your doctor and yourself will realize that the damage that was not repaired in the first treatment combined with the further damage accumulated over the 20 years since is again posing a health risk. At this point it is time for another intervention. It is now that the progress in medicine comes into play because, by the time 20 years has gone by, anti-aging medicine will have progressed significantly and, whilst the first treatment bought you an extra 25 or 30 years by repairing a fair amount of the damage accumulated over your first 60 years, it did not repair it all. 20 years later medical progress will mean that the latest treatment can not only repair all of the damage corrected by the first intervention but also some of the damage that was not able to be repaired 20 years earlier so in essence you are now chronologically 80 (but biologically in your 50s). This means that, whilst you will have aged 20 years chronologically you will be biologically younger after the second intervention than you were after the first. This is the essence of ADGs theory and pretty much any other theory based on rejuvenation and damage repair, essentially, it's a shortcut to radical life extension. It is not a cure but it acknowledges that it does not need to be because it simply buys time and leads to a situation where regular interventions at say 15/20 year intervals with increasing effective treatments could extend life virtually indefinitely. Will it happen? At this point, there is no doubt that it will happen eventually.

I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the overturning of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe. This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made those massive demographic interventions possible – ranging from armaments to the control of information – had now achieved escape velocity: they were no longer under anyone’s control. This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them. The world had changed too much, too fast; the systems that were in control now did not obey any human master; they followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons.

My dear friend, Ray Kurzweil, speaks about a concept called “longevity escape velocity.” It’s an intriguing notion that in the near future, science will be able to extend your life by more than a year for every year you are alive. Once that happens, we can begin to think about true longevity.

Ray’s prediction is that we’ll reach longevity escape velocity in the next ten to twelve years. Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School echoes that same time frame.

You fool. Do you really think we can escape?” Ding Yi said while still laughing sinisterly. “Escape velocity! Why don’t you calculate the escape velocity? Are you thinking with your butt? Heh heh heh heh…

Now I remember, this happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult the rewards will be great. Exercise your human mind as fully as possible knowing that it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the senses, filled with joy and sorrow and laughter, empathy, compassion, and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag. I remember where I came from, and how I became human, why I hung around, and now my final departure's scheduled. This way out, escaping velocity. Not just eternity, but Infinity.

the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens. Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of 'Mr. Belvedere.' I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

All either of us needed was the right dream.

If Mozart had been born a Kalahari Bushman, he’d have been known as the best drummer in his family.

For a business to break out and reach escape velocity, it needs a ton of differentiation. It needs to profoundly upset and disrupt the status quo.

A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.

I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape. Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own.