Stephen Baxter Quotes

In his reliance on evidence, preferably obtained at first hand, Hutton was showing the way to the geological methods of the future.

There was a great wave of extinctions that, ultimately, couldn’t be stopped. How bad was it? Well, Oona, we don’t really know. We didn’t even get as far as counting all the species before destroying them. Yes, that’s right; a lot of species must have died out before we even knew they were there. Shivery thought, isn’t it?

But what would humans do, she mused, if they stumbled on a situation like this?
Well they wouldn’t be satisfied with the generosity of Candyland. They’d breed until the caves were overflowing. The hunters would start ranging farther until all the animals in the area were eaten or driven away. Then agriculture would start, with everybody forced to bend their bodies to back-breaking toil, day after day. As the population exploded the forests would be cut back, the animals decimated.
Then would come the famines and the wars.

It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted.

To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes—information, ideas, fears, and hopes—spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed.
It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us.

He set no great value on money, or, perhaps, to speak properly, he set on it no more than its true value.

Life, Cassiopeia said, was emergent everywhere. Planets were the crucible. Life curdled, took hold, evolved, in every nook and cranny it could find in the great nursery that was the Galaxy.

One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one’s moral qualms.

Hutton became very critical of a system where appointments depended not on merit but on the support of those in power. Of one possible opening for Watt he wrote, ‘I think it only needs to have a man properly bestir himself but that is what few political people do unless to serve themselves.’

The shortness of human lives, she thought. Our curse. Every generation thinks it is immortal, that it has been born into a world that has never changed, and will never change.

Humans and their petty doings come and go, but the geology endures.

The main reason to exercise, he thought: It stops your brain working, lets your body remind you you’re still an animal. It was the only respite he got from being himself.

Well, the world may be heading for the iceberg, but the dead hand of old Darwin is still on the tiller.
What am I talking about? Just this: if most people stop breeding, the handful of people who love kids and want to have them—people like me—are, within a generation or two, going to outnumber everyone else. Simple math.
And that’s exactly what is happening.

It (i. e., agriculture) was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future—even genetic engineering—were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.

Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.