It is in our collective behavior that we are the most mysterious. We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves until we've understood this, and we're not even close. All we know is the phenomenon: we spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives. By the time we reach the end, each of us has taken in a staggering store, enough to exhaust any computer, much of it incomprehensible, and we generally manage to put out even more than we take in. Information is our source of energy; we are driven by it. It has become a tremendous enterprise, a kind of energy system on its own. All 3 billion of us are being connected by telephones, radios, television sets, airplanes, satellites, harangues on public-address systems, newspapers, magazines, leaflets dropped from great heights, words got in edgewise. We are becoming a grid, a circuitry around the earth. Lewis Thomas
About This Quote

The Internet is the greatest information storage medium that has ever been built. There are approximately 3 billion Internet users worldwide, and that number is growing at a tremendous rate. The Internet has been referred to as a nerve system for humanity. If you want to know where someone is, what they are doing, or what they think, you can find out very quickly with a couple of keystrokes.

The Internet is a vast network of computers all linked up so that you can send information to each other instantly. This makes it possible to send words, pictures, videos, programs and other files from one computer to another without having to wait for anything to be mailed or faxed.

Source: The Lives Of A Cell: Notes Of A Biology Watcher

Some Similar Quotes
  1. I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst... - Isaac Newton
  2. To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. - Evelyn Fox Keller
  3. The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists. - Unknown
  4. One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience. - Alice James
  5. If time be judiciously employed, there is time for everything. - George Head
More Quotes By Lewis Thomas
  1. Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of our existence should keep us all in a state of contented dazzlement.
  2. The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
  3. I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error...
  4. The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
  5. Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like this; they move, and live...
Related Topics