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" We have a name for people who create universes - they're called gods. There is no greater hubris than to think that we could take the place of godlike implications. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong. "

" 'Star Trek' is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety. "

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

" To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond. "

" 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. "

" Aging is mostly the failure to repair. "

" My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do. "

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

" 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. "

" Our moon was born too small to harbor life. It came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch spun a disk of rocks that condensed into a satellite. "

" 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. "

" Enzymes - plainly the most important biotechnology of our era - already permeate many industrial processes. Unlike fossil fuels, they carry chemical programming which drives complex reactions, are renewable, and work at ordinary pressures and temperatures. "

" Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources. "

" 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. "

" Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "