Stephen Baxter Quotes

Bex shrugged. “You think anybody’s going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far.”

He walks on, across the hot crimson dust.

They see the universe as essentially bountiful, a generous motherland. We see the universe as an enemy nation, to be occupied and mastered.

A lion takes only the last deer in the herd. She does not dream of having so many cubs that the plains would be full of nothing but lions. There are simple laws. Most species figure them out; you are the exception. An ecology of a single species is not viable. A diverse, stable world would provide for you.

We'd carve a place out of the wilderness—"
"But there is no wilderness, Mane said. "Even without war, even if you found a space not already cultivated, you would be forced to occupy a region, delineated in space, time, and energy flow, already exploited by another portion of the ecology."
It took some time for Emma to figure that out. "Yes," she said. "There is bound to be some environmental impact. But—"
"Other species would find reduced living space. Diversity would fall. And so it would go on. Soon the world would be covered from pole to pole by humans, fighting over the diminishing resources.

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.

No wonder you can’t figure out the Fermi Paradox, Malenfant, if you don’t know your own wife’s dress size.

We must consider the possibility that the manifold of universes through which we wonder is in fact infinite.

Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion.

They talked further, an incoherent conversation of disconnected fragments, peppered by misunderstanding, suffused by mistrust.

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

There were no cop cars cruising through that darkness, no watching choppers or surveillance satellites, nobody out there to help him—no law operating save the savagely impartial rule of nature.
And yet every day he was struck by the strange orderliness of the place. Decaying animal corpses did not litter the ground, save for a handful of bleached bones here and there; it was rare to walk into so much as a heap of dung. There was death here, yes, there was blood and pain—but it was as if every creature, including the hominids, were a cog in some vaster machine, that served to sustain all their lives.
And every creature, presumably unconsciously, accepted its place and the sacrifices that came with it. All say one species of hominid, it seemed: Homo sap himself, who was forever seeking to tear up the world around him.

Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone.

A pinch of observation is worth a mountain of hypothesis.

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.