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Title: Heavenâs River
Authors: Dennis E. Taylor
Category: supplementals
Number of Highlights: 25
Date: 2026-03-08
Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
âThe Iron Rule: Treat others less powerful than you however you like. The Silver Rule: Treat others as youâd like to be treated. The Golden Rule: Treat others as theyâd like to be treated.â
âNot mathematically possible,â ANEC replied. âAll actions have risks. Most inactions even more so.â
âWhat it lacks in elegance, it makes up for with wads of unearned optimism. Letâs do it.â
âSome problems simply do not yield to reductionist techniques, particularly those that are dependent on emergent phenomena.â
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
âYouâre a small man with a small, shriveled soul, Mr. Whiplash,â Theresa said. âThere 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 fatherâs accomplishments without leaving a ripple.â
Tags: failing, knowledge, legacy
I was far more familiar with The Art of War than the art of conversation.
Tags: lol
âReplicative 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 havenât had any out-and-out psychos yet, but weâve definitely got some assholes.â
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 patternâmore advanced in some ways, less in others. I guess in isolation, the tech tree development path isnât an inevitable march.â
Itâs the standard âotherâ prejudice. Weâre immortal, stronger, faster, donât get tired, and are generally just more capable than a bio. No surprise thereâs concern about being displaced.â
Travel between stellar systems is uneventfulâthank God. Itâs hard to think of something eventful out between the stars that wouldnât leave me as a cloud of free-floating atoms.
Skippies?â I could feel my eyes bugging out, even in VR. âWhat, theyâve changed their avatars to beer cans and started calling people monkeys?â
âSo there isnât a problem with treatment of laborers?â âThese are Quinlans, Bob. They can live off the land. If someone started beating the deckhands, theyâd just all swim away. If they didnât outright disembowel the miscreant. Have you met Quinlans?â âMmm. Fair point. So theyâre cantankerous, mobile, can find food anywhere, and can sleep anywhere.â âUh-huh. Kind of hard to develop an oppressed underclass in those circumstances.â
We need something with actual counterfactual capability and a truly huge processing capacity, to try to answer questions just like this one.â
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, Iâd end up eating my words.
Itâs too easy to get myopic and see everything from the point of view of my own priorities.
âYou know what moguls are, right?â âUh âŠâ âThe buried bodies of forty-something men who took up snowboarding.â
âJust canât resist the potty jokes, can you?â Will grinned at him. âYou bet, number two.â
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.