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Accelerando

Charles Stross

Top 10 Best Quotes

“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”

“To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?”

“[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]”

“Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.”

“In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.”

“One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.”

“Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided--for a fee. (In the event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.)”

“The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318)”

“Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.”

“Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331)”

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Book Keywords:

mars, eschatology, evolution, space, aineko, terraforming, religious-experience, science, intelligence, metahuman, software, to-boldly-go, pigeons, singularity, mind-uploading, passel, star-trek, immortality, rapture-of-the-nerds, hallucination, exocortex, soul

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