Words matter. These are the best Gregory Benford Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Invoking nature with its implied supremacy ignores that many cultures have fundamentally differing ideas of even what nature is, much less how it should work.
A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.
To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.
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.
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.
Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical – thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration.
I have an artificial left shoulder, wired back together after a softball accident.
The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong.
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.
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.
The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein’s 1942 tale ‘Beyond This Horizon.’
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.
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.
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.
I’m a very big Faulkner fan ’cause I’m a Southerner.
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.
Dinner at college high table is one of the legendary experiences of England. I could remember keenly each one I had attended; the repartee is sharper than the cutlery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast – Mississippi, Alabama and so on.
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.
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.
Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency.
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.
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.
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.
True twins share womb chemistry and endure many fateful slings and arrows together. The fabled connection between twins is true in my case.
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.
I like audacious ideas.
Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.
I’ve always felt that specialization is best left to the insects.
Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems.
