Story of our species...everyone knows it's coming, but not so soon.

At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.

Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.

Although knowledge of how things work is sufficient to allow manipulation of nature, what humans really want to know is why things work. Children don't ask how the sky is blue. They ask why the sky is blue.

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.

Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science.

And entertainment has nothing to do with reality. Entertainment is antithetical to reality.