You’ll have to excuse our customs and immigration staff: they preach courtesy and respect while demonstrating exactly the opposite. - Alastair Reynolds

Who was it who said that a wise man speaks when he has something to say, but a fool speaks because he must?

Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.

Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time.