Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?'Sounds like a Japanese game show.'Kat straightens her shoulders. 'Okay, we're going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you're a science fiction writer.'Okay: 'World government... No cancer... Hover-boards.'Go further. What's the good future after that?'Spaceships. Party on Mars.'Further.'Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.'Further.'I pause a moment, then realize: 'I can't.'Kat shakes her head. 'It's really hard. And that's, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

Though often scoffed at by “serious” writers, science fiction worms its way into our cultural psyche in interesting ways, and not just as predictors of technology. Many of these writers translate the –isms of our times into imagined futures populated with characters coping with the consequences.

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didn't think he would have the right answer. But after today's mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him of what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.

The ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in'Fermat's principle sounds weird because it describes light's behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: 'Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.

There is no more precious currency than the unfettered liberty to explore while engaged in an 'Idea Economy'. You cannot centrally plan the 'Idea Economy' any more than you can plan fun or spontaneity. Regulations are restraints in an 'Idea Economy'. The entrepreneur is either free to experiment or not.

Corruption ultimately guilts the corrupt, and it hardens the innocent who suffer as a result of it. It isn't the young who corrupt the old, rather it's the inverse.The aim of the old should be to ensure that the young grow up incorruptible.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.