Complex life was merely the recent froth over a great vat of prokaryotes feeding and dividing and dying.
Tags: science, origins, complexity-theory, bacteria

Other Quotes by "Adrian Tchaikovsky"

They do not conceive of it as some celestial spider-god that will reach down into their green world and save them from the ant tied. However, the message *is*. The Messenger *is*. These are facts, and those facts are the doorway to an invisible, intangible world of the unknown. The true meaning of the message is that there is *more* than spider eyes can see or spider feet can feel. That is where hope lies, for there may yet be salvation hidden within that *more*. It inspires them to keep looking.
Tags: science-and-religion, science, religion, ontology, agnosticism
Ah, but it is an interesting thing, that these things can so seldom be proved. If I were to perform some piece of, hrmf, magic for you, here in this room, you would claim a thousand ways it could have been done. Indeed, those ways might be exceedingly unlikely, but you would cling to them rather than accept the, mmn, the chance that magic, the eternal inexplicable, might be the true agent, and if you were strong enough in yourself, unafraid, unthreatened, here in your own chambers, well perhaps there would be no magic worked at all. It is a subjective force, you see, whereas the physical laws of the artificers are objective. A gear-train will turn without faith, but magic may not. And so, when your people demand, mmn, proof, there is none, but when you have forgotten and dismissed it, then magic creeps back into the gaps where you do not look for it.
Tags: woodlouse-kinden, the-inexplicable-eternal, proof, magic, inapt, gjegevey, faith
In Collegium it had been the fashion, while he had been resident there, to paint death as a grey-skinned, balding Beetle man in plain robes, perhaps with a doctor's bag but more often an artificer's toolstrip and apron, like the man who came in, at the close of the day, to put out the lamps and still the workings of the machines. Among his own people, death was a swift insect, gleaming black, its wings a blur - too fast to be outrun and too agile to be avoided, the unplumbed void in which he swam was but the depth of a single facet of its darkly jewelled eyes.
Tags: salme-dien, death
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