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.

The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer.

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.

What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.

If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including everything in the universe that's potentially available.

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

Meaning is like pornography, you know it when you see it.