Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex.

Some folks think life and technology and mind can keep expanding forever. Others say it can't. We are still not clear on that.

According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here.

When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day.

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.

Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.

When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.