“We stood with our noses in the air and our eyes turned to the stars. ‘Imagine if there’s life out there,’ we said to each other. Because we felt so lonesome in the universe. But if we’d only lowered our eyes… if only we’d been less self-obsessed and arrogant… then maybe we’d have discovered that we live on a planet that’s teeming with life, and that there are over seven million species to get to know. But we deemed ourselves to be elevated above the others. And the stars were too far away… If we were to have anyone with whom to share our thoughts and impressions, we’d have to make them ourselves, we thought. Thus the dream of artificial intelligence grew. I’m thinking of all the things we’ve missed. All the opportunities we had. All the life we just dismissed with a shrug.”

- The artist Nerife contemplates the history of the human species, approximately 2700 AD.
Translated by me from Tor Åge Bringsværd’s “Web”, p. 314.