Would an alien outsider judge America’s performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson? — Gregory Benford

“Quite patently artificial,” she said.

“Looks like it to me, and I’m just a physicist.”

“I thought you were an engineer-pilot.”

“Hey, physicists can do anything.”

“Um. So they think. But not biology…”

Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man’s belt—big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.

There was more known, but always more to be known.

Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable.