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"I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am?

by xvector 5y ago

"I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!"

iszomer 5y ago
Best John/Cavil quote of BSG!
- xvector 5y ago
  It's a beautiful quote. I truly think what the quote describes is the endgame for our species. This short story conceptualizes the beauty of such an idea really well: http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html
  - hoseja 5y ago
    I'm afraid the endgame is more akin to a specialized cell in a state-body. With apoptosis. It's just more competitive.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I think there is a likely endgame of 41C in the offing.
    - ruined 5y ago
      im trying to parse what you said in some way that's not immediately interpretable as a read on the present but i keep failing
- scrollaway 5y ago
  Truly is. Reading it, I immediately knew what it was and heard it in his voice… and I don't think I ever rewatched Battlestar Galactica. I watch a lot of TV and I know a lot of really cool or funny quotes, but this one, it's impactful.
ak217 5y ago
Seriously, I want this in my retinas, along with the sixteen mantis shrimp photoreceptors. And dog ears.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lvncelot 5y ago
  On the other hand, I have enough sensory overload as is, without tasting the EM field.
  - himlion 5y ago
    That is a good one, I wonder how our brains would manage it.
    - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      Probably similar to how we already deal with it - shutting down, having a meltdown, seeking sensory isolation, etc. I mean most people already do this, by e.g. putting in some earbuds and looking at your phone / newspaper / middle distance while in public transit.
    - neonihil 5y ago
      For a demo version drop some acid. :)
    - e_proxus 5y ago
      Brains are incredibly adaptive. There are tons of experiences where people have had diminished or lost access to one of the senses and recovered surprisingly well. I had a colleague once who had a stroke and described his vision afterwards as looking though splintered glass. After a while, he explained he didn’t perceive it anymore and that his brain just decided to “workaround” the issue making new connections where needed. I think having some “sense” of magnetic fields could be very subtle, like just a feeling of which direction you’re facing when you’re turning around (you could argue you already use the position of the sun this way, subconsciously). People into body mods who get a magnetic implant often describe it as a sixth sense [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_implant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_implant
Nux 5y ago
That's a very dramatic moment in the BSG odyssey. Worth watching it again: https://youtu.be/mPnx3zO3SDc?t=126 https://youtu.be/mPnx3zO3SDc?t=126

treeman79 5y ago
https://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/ocular-migraine.htm https://www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/ocular-migraine.ht... Ocular migraines will give the splintered glass effect. They are temporary however.

snypher 5y ago

We can ask Grimes when she walks too close to an Ikea lamp.

varjag 5y ago

Visible light is also EM radiation, so I say you're good with it!

slver 5y ago

One of the key functions of the mind is which aspects of input to pay attention to and which not to. So I wonder what sensory overload is. You can get sensory overload if there's environmental overload. But otherwise it's like the mind can't discriminate well enough.

FranOntanaya 5y ago

I have a feeling most of our cities would be unhabitable if we had dog ears.

amelius 5y ago
And 44kHz CD quality would sound like crap.
bongoman37 5y ago
If we suddenly got it, yes. Otherwise we would design cities not to bother us. Also, dogs do live in large numbers even in our present cities and have longer lifespans than they do in the wild.

vondro 5y ago

All that, but the dog ears. I can hear neighbor's loud TV very well already :-)

mattkrause 5y ago

Oddly, the shrimp themselves are not great at color discrimination. Hanne Theon and colleagues trained mantis shrimp to attack squares of certain colors to get food rewards. Attacks on other “distractor” squares weren’t rewarded. By varying the color of those distractors, one can measure the spectral sensitivity of their visual system. Using similar methods, humans can distinguish between wavelengths a few nm apart; mantis shrimp are more like 20 nm. This is disappointing, but the reason is pretty wild. Most animals have “color opponency”: circuits early in the visual system convert the photoreceptors’ output into a differential representation: the intensity of red light here minus the intensity of green light in the surrounding neighborhood. This mechanism “normalizes” for the total amount of light, thereby letting you separately perceive hue and brightness, and has some other nice properties. Mantis Shrimp took a different path. There’s no obvious inhibitory interaction between the photoreceptors. They may therefore separately perceive redness, greenness, blueness, etc, but without combining these streams of information, their color acuity is poor. Interestingly, they do a “scanning” behavior that sort of recreates the opponency by dragging different types of photoreceptors across the same part of the visual world. Thoen, H. H., How, M. J., Chiou, T. H., & Marshall, J. (2014). A different form of color vision in mantis shrimp. Science, 343(6169), 411–413. http://dx.doi.org/ http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1126/science.1245824 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tsyr-Huei-Chiou/publication/259883148_A_Different_Form_of_Color_Vision_in_Mantis_Shrimp/links/53f168e40cf23733e815b97d/A-Different-Form-of-Color-Vision-in-Mantis-Shrimp.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tsyr-Huei-Chiou/publica...