DON'T DIE

“This is why I brought Blueprint along, everybody,” I said. “As you can see, he’s a forward thinker. The writer Frederik Pohl once said, ‘A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.’ The claim that everything in the future will be programmable is an automobile idea. It’s not too hard to see or say

Capital. Which part of me has control? Who defines the alignments between our organs, our bodies, our interests, and our mind? Why can’t I tell my stubbed toe to stop hurting? Or my paper cut to stop bleeding? Isn’t it my body? Is a mind just one thing or is it a bunch of incorporated regions with energy and land rights disputes who secretly hate t

“My theory? I think maybe you just want the social connections back from our childhoods. You don’t want God. You want religion. You don’t want to win Pascal’s wager. You just want to maximize your remaining time, and you know that deep down, your happiest place is in a group of people who all believe the same thing. Secular friend groups are what,

“Back in my small town, there’s a saying all the doctors use. That the best and only way to get people to truly change their relationships with food and drugs and stuff is to alert them they are pregnant or have diabetes. Nothing else works. Ever. You can say they have lung cancer and ask them to stop smoking cigarettes like they tried with my gran

What if we, one day, will be as far behind cognitively, relatively, as cavemen are to us? Is there any reason to believe at all we have reached the peak of human consciousness and ability? The burden of proof is in many ways on those thinking we have somehow hit a ceiling than it is on anyone claiming we haven’t. What if one day we could actually w

“Just as an aside,” I said, “and I don’t mean to interrupt—well, I guess I do, or else I wouldn’t have, what a silly phrase—there

Don’t you ever stop to question why things are the way they are now? Pick a random time or place on this Earth and plop yourself down into any of its cities as just a normal citizen. Ancient Egypt. Modern Egypt. The Roman Empire. Sparta. Istanbul. Congo, now or then. St. Petersburg. Ancient Beijing. Feudal Japan. Māori New Zealand. There isn’t just

It’s like what John Adams once wrote about generational progress and what we owe our kids. I love the quote so much I wrote it down in my wallet. Here it is, let me read it to you all: ‘I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, na

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“It’s hard to imagine what our minds would do with a new abundance of energy, but we do have two precedents in the billions of years across the span of life on earth: mitochondria, the ‘powerhouse’ of the cell, and fire. Billions of years ago, single cells had to do all the work—find food, run away, convert the food to energy, and all that. It was