After a time it became unbearable, the lesson blinding in its cruelty: but if the universe didn’t get you, other sentient beings would. - Stephen Baxter

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.

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.’

Life had always been chancy. And now life had found ways of surviving the ultimate extinction event. In new oceans and on strange lands, evolution had begun again.
But it had nothing to do with mankind.