Randall Munroe

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Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go

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The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision

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But what about gender and sexual orientation? And culture? And language? We could keep using demographics to try to narrow things down further, but we would be drifting away from the idea of a random soulmate. In our scenario, you wouldn’t know anything about who your soulmate was until you looked into their eyes. Everybody would have only one orientation: towards their soulmate

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If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics