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" Fandom grew first through individual correspondence. It was cheap and quick, continent-wide contact for a penny stamp. "

Gregory Benford

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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. "

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" As we all saw in grade school, once you learn how to read a book, somebody is going to want to write one - that's how authors are made. Once we know how to read our own genetic code, someone is going to want to rewrite that 'text,' tinker with traits - play God, some would say. "

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" Aging is mostly the failure to repair. "

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" 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. "

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" True twins share womb chemistry and endure many fateful slings and arrows together. The fabled connection between twins is true in my case. "

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" I have an artificial left shoulder, wired back together after a softball accident. "

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" Around 1930, a small new phenomenon arose in Depression-ridden America, spawned out of the letter columns in science fiction magazines: fandom. "

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" 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. "

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" The simplest way to remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is to grow plants - preferably trees, since they tie up more of the gas in cellulose, meaning it will not return to the air within a season or two. Plants build themselves out of air and water, taking only a tiny fraction of their mass from the soil. "

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" We hope we can slow or possibly reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's. "

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring. "

Gregory Benford

" Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else. "

Gregory Benford

" The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction. "

Gregory Benford

Science Fiction

" A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly. "

Gregory Benford

" Like immense time-binding discussions, genres allow ideas to be developed and traded, and for variations to be spun down through decades. "

Gregory Benford

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity. "

Gregory Benford

" Star Trek's insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well-defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places. "

Gregory Benford

" 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

" 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

" I've always felt that specialization is best left to the insects. "

Gregory Benford

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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