Information—its gathering, interpretation and storage—is the ultimate goal of all intelligent life. - Stephen Baxter

The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.

Ussher’s intense and obsessive project seems very odd to the eyes of a modern scientist. After all he had deduced the age of the Earth without looking at a scrap of physical evidence—not a single rock.

Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales—which said that Jahna’s people were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human—taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.
But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such non-people as the Old Man’s kind.