Where orbits are wildly varying, life has no chance to develop. Changes are too extreme. Temperatures melt tin, then solidify nitrogen. If it is once… - Charles Sheffield

Logic was good, but too much logical analysis inhibited action. Darya had heard it seriously suggested that the original human cladeworld, Earth, had degenerated to an ineffectual backwater of a planet because computer trade-off analysis had increasingly been used as the basis for decision making. On purely logical grounds, no one would ever explore, invent, rejoice, sing, strive, fall in love, or take physical and psychological risks of any kind. Better to stay in bed in the morning; it was much safer.

The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go.

My aunt doesn't even believe there is a Ship. She says we've been here on Pentecost forever."
"What did you tell her?"
"Nothing. For someone with that view, logic is irrelevant—she'll believe what she chooses, regardless of evidence. Her religion says God placed us here on Pentecost, and for her that's the end of the argument."
"And you?" Peron was aware that she had moved in very close to him. "What do you think?"
"You know what I think. I'm cursed with a logical mind, and a lot of curiosity.