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" Certainly I see no reason why society should prevent grieving parents from having a baby cloned from the cells of a dead child if they wish. "
Gregory Benford
Child
Society
See
Related Quotes:
" Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable. "
Gregory Benford
Space
Predict
Science Fiction
" You don't actually have ideas; ideas have you. "
Gregory Benford
Ideas
Actually
You
" As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church. "
Gregory Benford
Science
Change
Technology
" To us large creatures, space-time is like the sea seen from an ocean liner, smooth and serene. Up close, though, on tiny scales, it's waves and bubbles. At extremely fine scales, pockets and bubbles of space-time can form at random, sputtering into being, then dissolving. "
Gregory Benford
Random
Sea
Ocean
" DNA sequencing opens vast ethical issues. We shall be able to know who has defective genes. What will it mean when we can be sure we're not all born equal? Worked out, the implications will scare a lot of people. Insurance companies will not want to cover those with a genetic predisposition to illness, for example. Here lurk myriad lawsuits. "
Gregory Benford
DNA
Born
Insurance
" Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else. "
Gregory Benford
You
Life
Science
" Fandom grew first through individual correspondence. It was cheap and quick, continent-wide contact for a penny stamp. "
Gregory Benford
Quick
Cheap
Individual
" Genre pleasures are many, but the quality of shared values within an ongoing discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans. "
Gregory Benford
Quality
Values
Powerful
" As fandom grew more variegated, genzines reflected a broadening of interests, carrying personal columns of humor and reflection, science articles, amateur fiction, stylish gossip, and inevitably, thoughtful pieces on the future of fandom. "
Gregory Benford
Science
Reflection
More
" Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems. "
Gregory Benford
You
Problems
Experience
" Virtuality - connection without proximity - is a major attraction in both fandom and the Net. Nobody knows you're a dog through the U.S. mail, either. Fans could be utterly different in their fanzine persona, which may be why both fandom and the Net were invented by individualistic Americans. "
Gregory Benford
Connection
You
Nobody
" Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora take only a few years. "
Gregory Benford
Air
Land
Like
" Seeing the space future through science fiction can be difficult. Much science fiction of the early era, the 1950s through the '70s, took an expansionist view. "
Gregory Benford
Science
Space
View
" Will searching for distant messages work? Is there intelligent life out there? The SETI effort is worth continuing, but our common-sense beacons approach seems more likely to answer those questions. "
Gregory Benford
Work
Worth
Life
" My brother Jim and I shared a womb without a view for nine months. "
Gregory Benford
Without
View
Nine
" The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture. "
Gregory Benford
Evil
Own
Past
" It turns out that if you optimize the performance of a car and of an airplane, they are very far away in terms of mechanical features. So you can make a flying car. But they are not very good planes, and they are not very good cars. "
Gregory Benford
Flying
Airplane
Car
" The moon's closeness is a huge advantage: To make it habitable, we would first have to bombard it with water-ice comets, a tricky endeavor best attempted with the many resources waiting on and near Earth. "
Gregory Benford
Earth
Best
Waiting
" Aging is mostly the failure to repair. "
Gregory Benford
Mostly
Failure
Aging
" The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while. "
Gregory Benford
Land
Civilization
Living
" In science fiction, basic doubts featured prominently in the worlds of Philip K. Dick. I knew Phil for 25 years, and he was always getting onto me, a scientist. He was a great fan of quantum uncertainty, epistemology in science, the lot. "
Gregory Benford
Always
Uncertainty
Science
" When Joseph Wambaugh writes about the LAPD, you listen because you know he knows the scene. Lots of people write cop novels, but they don't have that authenticity. "
Gregory Benford
You
Listen
Know
" It really helps if you know your subject matter immediately. I find that enormously useful because then you can concentrate on all the usual novelistic things - the character, the plot and so forth - and you don't have to spend an enormous amount of time learning another trade, essentially. "
Gregory Benford
Learning
Know
Character
" The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.' "
Gregory Benford
Science Fiction
Science
Horizon
" In coastal waters rich in runoff, plankton can swarm densely, a million in a drop of water. They color the sea brown and green where deltas form from big rivers, or cities dump their sewage. Tiny yet hugely important, plankton govern how well the sea harvests the sun's bounty, and so are the foundation of the ocean's food chain. "
Gregory Benford
Sea
Ocean
Sun
" To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond. "
Gregory Benford
New
Beyond
Even
" Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings. "
Gregory Benford
Our
Losing
Past
" Because I've been a full professor doing research and lecturing at the University of California, I didn't have a lot of time to write, so I have always used my unconscious a great deal to do the really heavy lifting. "
Gregory Benford
Doing
Research
Time
" In temperate zones, winter is the best insecticide; it keeps the bugs in check. The tropics enjoy no such respite, so plants there have developed a wide range of alkaloids that kill off nosy insects and animals. "
Gregory Benford
Plants
Animals
Enjoy
" Terraforming our moon will take many decades and vast abilities. Before we can begin, we'll have to master the resources of our solar system - especially transporting raw masses over interplanetary distances. "
Gregory Benford
Master
Over
Solar