("JP")

With Mars as a thought vehicle, we can start to imagine, “Okay, what will we put up there?”, and we can think outside of the systems that really hinder our thinking on Earth. We'll go into a whole set of design principles that we can use for actually building things there. But, ultimately, it's really important to just think beyond our current... See more

New discoveries often have to be conceived initially as variations of existing things,

even by their discoverers

, because there isn't yet the conceptual vocabulary to express them.

• Prince Andrei Bolkonsky: There must be something you want to do.


• Pierre Bezukhov: I want to discover... everything! I want to discover why I know what's right and still do what's wrong. I want to discover what happiness is, and what value there is in suffering. I want to discover why men go to war, and what they really say deep in their hearts when

... See more

I’ve started to think of “cultural artifacts” and “memes” as particles in a chaotic pressure chamber of social forces. I want to introduce the concept of the meme as “radioactive cultural product” – radioactive because of two properties: radiation and half-life .