Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

We need to play each others instruments.

The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.

If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.