Sphere

This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine.

Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.

In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we call history and science.

On the video monitor, they saw Ted Fielding slap the polished sphere and shout, "Open! Open Sesame! Open up, you son of a bitch!" The sphere did not respond.

All the deep-diving studies show that women are superior for submerged operations. They're physically smaller and consume less nutrients and air, they have better social skills and tolerate close quarters better, and they are physiologically tougher and have better endurance.

The Thematic Apperception Test was a psychological test that consisted of a series of ambiguous pictures. Subjects were supposed to tell what they thought was happening in the pictures. Since no clear story was implied by the pictures, the subjects supplied the stories. And the stories told much more about the storytellers than about the pictures.

En cierto sentido, no estamos integrados más que por recuerdos. Nuestra personalidad se estructura a partir de recuerdos, nuestra vida está organizada en torno a recuerdos, nuestras culturas se erigen sobre los cimientos de los recuerdos compartidos, a los que denominamos "historia" y "ciencia". Y desistir de un recuerdo, desistir del conocimiento, desistir de los pasado no es fácil.

Like our padded cell?" He poked the insulated walls. "It's like living in a vagina.

The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen. This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you--the ability to imagine.

you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.

It is an absurd expression of romantic hope.

theoretician, his reputation secured in probability-density functions

And I think the answer is that we are, in reality, terribly frail animals. And we don’t like to be reminded of how frail we are—how delicate the balances are inside our own bodies, how short our stay on Earth, and how easily it is ended. So