- Congress
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- Nov 07, 2020
Gregory Benford Quotes
Most Famous Gregory Benford Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Genuine
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- Nov 07, 2020
Very little useful science got done in the space station. NASA never did the experiments needed to develop the technologies required for a genuine interplanetary expedition: centrifugal gravity to avoid bodily harm and a truly closed biosphere.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Predict
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- Nov 07, 2020
Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems.
- Appeared
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- Nov 07, 2020
The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.'
- Evil
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.
- Density
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- Nov 07, 2020
Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.
- Ocean
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Each One
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Ideas
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- Nov 07, 2020
Like immense time-binding discussions, genres allow ideas to be developed and traded, and for variations to be spun down through decades.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
'Star Trek' is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety.
- May
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Plants
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Ocean
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Food
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- Nov 07, 2020
In coastal waters rich in runoff, plankton can swarm densely, a million in a drop of water. They color the sea brown and green where deltas form from big rivers, or cities dump their sewage. Tiny yet hugely important, plankton govern how well the sea harvests the sun's bounty, and so are the foundation of the ocean's food chain.
- Endure
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- Nov 07, 2020
True twins share womb chemistry and endure many fateful slings and arrows together. The fabled connection between twins is true in my case.
- Education
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- Nov 07, 2020
Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance.
- Parents
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Fossil
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Back
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- Nov 07, 2020
I have an artificial left shoulder, wired back together after a softball accident.
- Living
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- Nov 07, 2020
The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.
- How
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Columns
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- Nov 07, 2020
Around 1930, a small new phenomenon arose in Depression-ridden America, spawned out of the letter columns in science fiction magazines: fandom.
- First
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- Nov 07, 2020
Fandom grew first through individual correspondence. It was cheap and quick, continent-wide contact for a penny stamp.
- May
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Columns
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Car
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Born
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- God
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Best
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- Nov 07, 2020
In temperate zones, winter is the best insecticide; it keeps the bugs in check. The tropics enjoy no such respite, so plants there have developed a wide range of alkaloids that kill off nosy insects and animals.
- Moon
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- Nov 07, 2020
To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.
- Moon
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Disk
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Best
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Car
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Process
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- Nov 07, 2020
A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.
- Down
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- Nov 07, 2020
The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong.
- Boring
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.
- Memories
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Famous
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Failure
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- Nov 07, 2020
Aging is mostly the failure to repair.
- Ideas
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- Nov 07, 2020
I like audacious ideas.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Name
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Learning
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Art
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- Nov 07, 2020
This was the 1940s; there was no television. It was a different age - it was not swamped by media; it was swamped by reality, and storytelling was a very big art where I came from.
- Nov 07, 2020
The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.
- Nov 07, 2020
The talk shows I've done are all radio for exactly this reason: I don't want to wear a rubber mask.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Morning
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- Nov 07, 2020
At the end of the day, I sit down for about five minutes and review all the problems I'm working on, research problems or writing problems, and I go to sleep. Then when I wake up in the morning, I've trained myself to not open my eyes and to just lie there and recall the problems and see if there's anything there.
- Ideas
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- Nov 07, 2020
You don't actually have ideas; ideas have you.
- Cause
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- Nov 07, 2020