I'm just one flower with a titanic arsenal of technological power. What can *I* do? -- Bob the angry flower Science aspires to the condition of deicide. Technology aspires to the condition of theogenesis. Science fiction aspires to the condition of theophany. -- Damien Broderick Transhumanism aspires to the condition of theanthropism. -- Anders Sandberg > --- Emlyn O'regan > It's depressing how buggy the universe is. Depressing? It's elating. Explains the meaning of human existence: we are evolving to debug this place. -- spike Are we not gods? And are we not unprecedented in this: our steadfast betrayal of our own past, just as it barely reaches the age of victory, and our steadfast rage, raised above the planet like a hammer whose time has come? Planet Earth begins to shake already at the heavy tread of our feet! Victor Khlebnikov, "The Trumpet of the Martians" Some people would accuse me of 'playing god' but I disagree. To play god, I would have to call energy into existence from nothing and form that into matter. I'd have to wait a few billion years for that to become life. I'd have to wait a few more billion years for that life to become human beings. Frankly, I don't have time to 'Play God', I'd rather just use what's already here. James Swayze I maintain nonetheless that yin-yang dualism can be overcome. With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower, not of physical strength. -- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang "Essays on Mind and Matter" God; He's my role model! When I grow up I wanna be just like him! 'When we are a million species spreading through the galaxy, the question "Can man play God and still stay sane?" will lose some of its terrors. We shall be playing God, but only as local deities and not as lords of the universe. There is safety in numbers. Some of us will become insane, and rule over empires as crazy as Doctor Moreau's island. Some of us will shit on the morning star. There will be conflicts and tragedies. But in the long run, the sane will adapt and survive better than the insane. Nature's pruning of the unfit will limit the spread of insanity among species in the galaxy, as it does among individuals on earth. Sanity is, in its essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature's laws. >From Dyson's "Greening of the Galaxy" (From _Disturbing the Universe_). * * * "The distance between man and the gods is not all that much greater than the distance between beasts and man. We have already closed the latter gap, and there is no reason to suppose we shall not eventually close the former." Ken Wilber There are, as always, three types of folk - Normal, Mad, and Genius. The normal bow before awkward facts, the mad deny them, while the heaven-sent Genius creates new ones! Michael Martin-Smith Our place in the universe is basically accidental. We are weak and mortal, but it's not the holy will of the gods; it's just the way things happen to be at the moment. And this is radically unsatisfactory; not because we direly miss the shelter of the Deity, but because, looked at objectively, the vale of human suffering is basically a dump. The human condition can be changed, and it will be changed, and is changing; the only real questions are how, and to what end. Bruce Sterling I think we must beware of a reflex and unthinking antipathy to everything "unnatural". Certainly cloning is unnatural. We haven't bred without sex for perhaps a thousand million years. But unnatural isn't a necessary synonym for bad. It's unnatural to read books, or travel faster than we can run, or scuba-dive, or fly. It's unnatural to wear clothes, but we do. Indeed, the people most likely to be scandalised at the prospect of human cloning are the very people most outraged by lack of human clothing. Richard Dawkins "Do you remember, Abelard... Once I told you that ecstasy was better than being God." "I remember." "I was wrong, darling. Being God is better." Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix We are as gods, so we might as well be good at it Stewart Brand EnGENEuity Inc. - We pick up where God left off I won't let the sun go down on me I won't let the sun go down Nik Kershaw "Creation is an act of WILL" - ? (Jurassic Park) Like the Romantics before them, genre SF writers have generally been on the side of Faust, convinced that the quest for knowledge was a sacred one, no matter how fondly a jealous God might prefer blind faith. Stableford, Brian and Peter Nichols. 1993. "Technology." Pp. 1202-1204 in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, eds. John Clute and Peter Nichols. NY: St. Martins Press. Anders Sandberg: One week ago I said that cloning of mammals was years away... it is fun to be alive at this point in history. Cosma: Man trully *is* God Jim Davila: Heaven help us! The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more A Sandberg When I was young, all I wanted was to be ruler of the universe. Now that isn't enough. -- Alex P. Keaton I think our grandparents were Victor Frankenstein. I basically am the kind of deeply unnatural creature that Mrs Shelley instinctively dreaded. I not only eat her sacred cows but I eat them with ketchup. While I take her point, I think that transgressive monstrosity and tampering with the life force are both a lot more fun than she suspected. Bruce Sterling Gen 11:6-7 [after the Tower of Babel had been built]: And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. "Non serviam" -- Lucifer. Run out of grand challenges, Real Hackers are yearning to hack the Universe. I want to play God and I think I'd be good at it. A vacuum needs filling, God probably doesn't exist, and even if He does the poor fellow will soon be fired for gross incompetence. Considering that the position is open, I see absolutely nothing wrong in applying for the job. John K Clark