July 2009
6 posts
The Andromeda Strain
“Hall said, ‘What are my chances?’
‘They don’t exist,’ Stone explained.”
-Michael Crichton
Prey
“Things never turn out the way you think they will.”
-Michael Crichton
Prey
“We think our bodies are solid, but that’s only because we can’t see what is going on at the cellular level. If you could enlarge the human body, blow it up to a vast size, you would see that it was literally nothing but a swirling mass of cells and atoms, clustered together into smaller swirls of cells and atoms.”
-Michael Crichton
Prey
“Most people imagined evolution to be a one-time-only process, a confluence of chance events. If plants hadn’t started making oxygen, animal life would never have evolved. If an asteroid hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs, mammals would never have taken over. If some fish hadn’t come onto land, we’d all still be in the water. And so on.
All that was true enough, but there was another side of...
Prey
“If you compressed the history of life on earth into twenty-four hours, then multicellular organisms appeared in the last twelve hours, dinosaurs in the last hour, the earliest men in the last forty seconds, and modern men less than one second ago.”
-Michael Crichton
Prey
“We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds - and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.”
-Michael Chricton