📇 Index
Highlights
Highlight ( Location 997)
Orange: In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.
Highlight ( Location 1652)
Cosmic microwave background radiation very precisely matched the thermal black body spectrum at a temperature of 2.7255 K and was highly isotropic—meaning nearly uniform in every direction—with only tiny temperature fluctuations at the parts per million range.
Highlight ( Location 1840)
Blue: Look down my throat and you can see out my ass.
Highlight ( Location 1844)
Blue: “Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy.” → Da Shi’s Law
Highlight ( Location 1916)
Orange: If killing you would solve the problem, you’d all be dead by now. But the most effective technique remains disrupting your thoughts.
Highlight ( Location 1926)
Orange: fearless out of ignorance,
Highlight ( Location 2089)
Orange: He felt like the starry sky was a magnifying glass that covered the world, and he was a tiny insect below the lens with nowhere to hide.
Highlight ( Location 2413)
Pink: How wonderful it will be if the universe really contains other intelligences and other societies! Bystanders have the clearest view. Someone truly neutral will then be able to comment on whether we’re the heroes or villains of history.
Highlight ( Location 2429)
Orange: the theory of “contact as symbol”
Highlight ( Location 2431)
Orange: contact with an alien civilization is only a symbol or a switch. Regardless of the content of the encounter, the results would be the same.
Highlight ( Location 2432)
Orange: only the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is confirmed, with no other substantive information—what → “elementary contact”
Highlight ( Location 2443)
Orange: A Type I civilization can muster an amount of energy equivalent to the total energy output of the Earth. Based on his estimates, the energy output of the Earth is about 1015 to 1016 watts. A Type II civilization can marshal the energy equivalent to the output of a typical star—1026 watts. A Type III civilization’s communication energy can reach 1036 watts, approximately equal to the energy output of a galaxy.
Highlight ( Location 3667)
Kardashev Type II civilization.
Highlight ( Location 3758)
Blue: Ye had the mental habits of a scientist, and she refused to forget.
Highlight ( Location 3775)
Blue: In the face of madness, rationality was powerless.
Highlight ( Location 3787)
Blue: In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation.
Highlight ( Location 5623)
Blue: Ten thousand times the web could be destroyed, and ten thousand times the spider would rebuild it. There was neither annoyance nor despair, nor any delight, just as it had been for a billion years.