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Now that dumb matter thinks , with every kilogram of wallpaper potentially hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors , now that every door is potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away , the humans can stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates past them , streaming into the luxurious void of their personal history . Evidently , that perk was something that Teague , a hawk of a businessman , was reluctant to give away . For the root remains , but to be taken away , or to be left , belongs to the branches . Let me just tell you here that in the case where the heavier ball is much heavier than the top one ( eight times the mass will sort of qualifyfor that ) , the top ball will fly away with twice the velocity it had before the collision , thereby reaching four times its previous height . From an environmental point of view , it makes no difference whether allowances are given away or auctioned .