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Title: Heaven’s River
Authors: Dennis E. Taylor
Category:supplementals
Number of Highlights: 25
Date: 2026-03-08
Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
“The Iron Rule: Treat others less powerful than you however you like. The Silver Rule: Treat others as you’d like to be treated. The Golden Rule: Treat others as they’d like to be treated.”
“Not mathematically possible,” ANEC replied. “All actions have risks. Most inactions even more so.”
“What it lacks in elegance, it makes up for with wads of unearned optimism. Let’s do it.”
“Some problems simply do not yield to reductionist techniques, particularly those that are dependent on emergent phenomena.”
Tags:emergent,problem_solving
And meanwhile, the wonderful thing about knowledge is that you can give it away and still have it.
Unfortunately, Bobs as a rule had too much common sense to get stuck with the duty, and I had too much of a sense of duty to listen to my common sense.
Tags:duty,responsibility
“You’re a small man with a small, shriveled soul, Mr. Whiplash,” Theresa said. “There is no bigger waste than a formal education given to someone incapable of using it. I have no doubt your whole life would disappear into your father’s accomplishments without leaving a ripple.”
I was far more familiar with The Art of War than the art of conversation.
Tags:lol
“Replicative drift is turning out to be a real thing. Bobs are recognizably one of us until about fifteenth generation or so, then the drift begins to accelerate. We haven’t had any out-and-out psychos yet, but we’ve definitely got some assholes.”
It was interesting how society kept evolving. The work-anywhere telecommuting style that had developed in the days after the Mat War had gradually given way to a returning preference for an actual workplace. Seemed people liked being in physical contact with their co-workers, and felt alienated when they were constantly on their own.
It appeared utopia was an unstable state.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.
Tags:discovery,perspective,scifi
The Boojums seem to be following the same pattern—more advanced in some ways, less in others. I guess in isolation, the tech tree development path isn’t an inevitable march.”
It’s the standard ‘other’ prejudice. We’re immortal, stronger, faster, don’t get tired, and are generally just more capable than a bio. No surprise there’s concern about being displaced.”
Travel between stellar systems is uneventful—thank God. It’s hard to think of something eventful out between the stars that wouldn’t leave me as a cloud of free-floating atoms.
Skippies?” I could feel my eyes bugging out, even in VR. “What, they’ve changed their avatars to beer cans and started calling people monkeys?”
“So there isn’t a problem with treatment of laborers?” “These are Quinlans, Bob. They can live off the land. If someone started beating the deckhands, they’d just all swim away. If they didn’t outright disembowel the miscreant. Have you met Quinlans?” “Mmm. Fair point. So they’re cantankerous, mobile, can find food anywhere, and can sleep anywhere.” “Uh-huh. Kind of hard to develop an oppressed underclass in those circumstances.”
We need something with actual counterfactual capability and a truly huge processing capacity, to try to answer questions just like this one.”
I was probably being overly paranoid, but the downside of overdoing it was much less bad than the downside of underpreparing.
Life after death. I wondered if, after all these years as a humanist, I’d end up eating my words.
It’s too easy to get myopic and see everything from the point of view of my own priorities.
“You know what moguls are, right?” “Uh …” “The buried bodies of forty-something men who took up snowboarding.”
“Just can’t resist the potty jokes, can you?” Will grinned at him. “You bet, number two.”
For the first time in a long, long time, I was beginning to feel excited again.
Licenses, statistics, taxes, all the usual things that seemed to infest civilizations everywhere.