The most extensive computation known has been conducted over the last billion years on a planet-wide scale: it is the evolution of life. The power of this computation is illustrated by the complexity and beauty of its crowning achievement, the human brain.
David Rogers in Weather Prediction Using a Genetic Memory
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Related quotes
If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!
quote by Rudy Rucker
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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.
quote by Seth Lloyd
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.
quote by Kurt Vonnegut
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Flyng At Night
five billion years away
a planet turns,
turning a million years
this side of the planet
and my heart beats
each beats
a million years
the other side of another planet
the distance that shortens
the years
as we watch a foreign body
five billion years away
a billion years passed
a universe caught in time
an eagle flaps its wing
each flag
a million years pass
that side of the planet
time is where you are
it walks away from you
as you walk away from it
inspired by
Flying at Night
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
Ted Kooser
poem by John Tiong Chunghoo
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Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.
quote by Rudy Rucker
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Theory Of Earth First Life Forms
Science claims life on planet earth
has teemed thrived multiplied
diversified for millions of years
then when did earth life begin?
This is one of the greatest mysteries
still waiting to be scientifically unraveled
and the theory is our first life forms
were miraculous one-celled creatures
that appeared on earth about 3 billion years
ago through evolution or Transpermia?
It's life Jim but not as we know it know it?
poem by Terence George Craddock
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A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.
quote by Rudy Rucker
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Four Billion Years
Four Billion Years
Four billion years of evolution,
Maybe more,
And we've come to this:
Abstractly desiring an intangible wad of green paper
That holds no intrinsic value—
Other than perhaps as a modicum of power and influence.
Four billion years—
And what have we accomplished?
We've burned down the rain forest
To make room for cattle farms
That are operated by colored people
That aren't paid enough to eat—
Yes, that's right, the white man still owns slaves—
So that we can grow morbidly obese,
Grease dripping from our mouths
Down the folds of fat that line our chins
To caress the curvature of our stomachs—
Circumference ever expanding.
We've made our children stupid,
Forcing them down the assembly line
Of public education; teaching them
To become disinterested in the world around them;
Telling them that what they like has no value
To society and that their lives lack meaning
If they lack surplus.
Our kids idolize the wealthy because they have things,
And things—I have been told—
Are more important than progress.
We're making oily bonfires in the desert
To illuminate upon our indifferences.
We destroy what we are told to destroy
Without considering the consequences,
Without realizing the dialectics we avoid,
The logic we could accrue from listening.
We believe a national identity
Is more essential than our relationship to species,
Thinking that we can only gain
Through our taking.
Four billion years,
Four billion years,
And we are looking at the end of the world,
Hoping for Rapture,
Praying that we go to heaven,
Granted a second life,
Because we've wasted the ones we've already had—
And wasted the lived of others.
Regardless if the end is coming,
Why don't we make the process of dying more comfortable?
Why don't we put the effort into saying we're worth
Another four billion years.
God, if you exist,
Would you extend our warranty because we're trying?
He wouldn't though.
We're not trying—
Or at least not hard enough.
Four billion years of evolution,
And people are asking to die at the end of the year.
If that's how we are,
We deserve it.
Let's not deserve it.
poem by Tim Stensloff
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Sonnet - The Earth
What beauty has the planet Earth! my gosh!
The only place where life seems to exist;
Discontent man is searching for worlds posh;
In extra-terrestrial planet-list.
The safest place to live is earth as yet;
The only one for man in Solar orb;
Five billion years-old earth alone is wet;
And wears the blue atmosphere as its garb.
The crust of earth solidified from gas;
And animals were born before came man;
The continental drifts, ice came to pass;
But no one knows when human beings ran?
The magnet Earth has gravity of own
Which keeps all things from flying off but down.
poem by John Celes
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After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.
quote by John Polkinghorne
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.
quote by Doug Coupland
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I have not proved that the universe is, in fact, a digital computer and that it's capable of performing universal computation, but it's plausible that it is.
quote by Seth Lloyd
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Quantum computation is... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.
quote by David Deutsch
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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We have lived through the flood time of fascism and of the nazism which ran its meteoric course at a cost to mankind in suffering and waste beyond all computation.
quote by Emily Greene Balch
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Our Times
Our Times
13.7 billion years ago
4.5 billion years ago
3.5 billion years ago
200 thousand years ago
10,000 years ago
5000 years ago
3500 years ago
1800 years ago
500 years ago
50 years ago
One hundred years from now
Five hundred years from now
Ten million years from now
Ten billion years from now
We are where we are now
Where are we now?
Who are we now?
What will we be?
When?
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Existence
Explain the unexplainable, beginning where life gathers together,
complex universe, intelligible process of an information generators
and astronomically improbability.
It is luck?
Accidents happen, without control of circumstance
human or animal, islands of life, in completions over time.
Chance ofinformation.
Evolution becomes conscious of itself.
Brain arises from problems solve.
Purpose or illusion, true? logic?
Interbreeding languages mutating languages
Ready in your mind, seconds before time
Logic. Refusal of a true statement
It is determined,
Incommunicable, can be spoken,
without making different to possibility, philosopher though.
Babies are semi individual, growing free will - take decisions.
Start with the conscience of God
Conscience with in brain (share with animal)
Self-conscience (only human) - self-awareness
Soul dos not terminated with dead.
Survive of the soul, can t be proven, but only by faith.
Human make a mass of
complexity and hope.
poem by Luca Menin
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We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.
quote by Carl Sagan
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.
unknown author
Submitted by Catalin Popescu
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Informatics studies the application of information technology to practically any field, while considering its impact on individuals, organizations, and society. It uses computation as a universal tool to solve problems in other fields, to communicate, and to express ideas.
Judith Tolliver in What is Informatics? Communications of the ACM (February 2010)
Submitted by Marin Vlada
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Learning … should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life's greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the minds of noble and learned men, not a conducted tour through a jail. So its surroundings should be as gracious as possible, to complement it.
quote by Taylor Caldwell
Submitted by Veronica Serbanoiu
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