advanced civilization Quotes

Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We'll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We'll have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. We'll be able to modify life in the future.

The energy necessary to create a wormhole or to wrap time into nuts is incredible. It's not for us. It's maybe for our descendants who have mastered the energy of this technology. So if one day, somebody knocks on your door and claims to be your great great great great granddaughter, don't slam the door.

What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque

It would take a civilization far more advanced than ours, unbelievably advanced, to begin to manipulate negative energy to create gateways to the past. But if you could obtain large quantities of negative energy-and that's a big "IF" - then you could create a time machine that apparently obeys Einstein's equation and perhaps the laws of quantum theory.

This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century.

Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us, ZORAC announced after a short pause. The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious.

A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge – everything that ever happened is still here.

I think [contacting an alien civilization] would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low.

We could tell them [alien civilization] things that we have discovered in the realm of mathematical physics, but there is stuff that I would like to know. There are some famous problems like how to bring gravitation and quantum physics together, the long-sought-after theory of quantum gravity. But it may be hard to understand the answer that comes back.

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?

We send messages all the time, free of charge. There's a big shell out there now, 80 light-years around us. A civilization only a little more advanced than we are can pick those things up.

I think the potential for man is so enormous, if we can stay alive long enough, we're going to be seeing a lot of what Star Trek is projecting.

For some time there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi', a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence.

And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.

It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.

In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.

Our planet has been around only for four and a half billion years. Let's imagine a planet that has life on it such as life is on Earth and it's seven billion years old. Let's say that planet evolved intelligence. Well, that intelligence would be way more advanced than what we call intelligence here on Earth. How long has intelligence been around on Earth as we've come to define it?

I think that an advanced planetary civilization will modify their own planets to be more stable, to prevent asteroid impacts and dangerous climate fluctuations.

We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge... no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command... But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young.

The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. that It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.

My reluctance to use alien invasion is due to the feeling that we are not likely to be invaded and taken over. It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species. Further than this, there should be no economic necessity of its doing so. By the time it was able to go into deep space, it must have arrived at an energy source which would not be based on planetary natural resources.

There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.

Clearly, unless thinking beings inevitably wipe themselves out soon after developing technology, extraterrestrial intelligence could often be millions or billions of years in advance of us. We're the galaxy's noodling newbies.

It's worth remembering that all technology leaves a footprint. For example, our own technology is leaving a footprint in terms of global warming, which could be detected from a long way away. One assumes that a very advanced civilization that has been around maybe millions and millions of years would have an even bigger footprint that might extend beyond its planet to its immediate astronomical environment.