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Stephen Baxter

150 quotes

“There was no design in this: no sense of improvement, of purpose. All that was happening was that each organism was struggling to preserve itself, its offspring, and its kin. But as the environment slowly changed, so through relentless selection did the species that inhabited it. It was not a process fueled by life, but by death: the elimination of the less well adapted, the endless culling of inappropriate possibilities. But the potential of an unseen future was no consolation to those who lived through the relentless culling.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With his eland meat Brow was able to reinforce his political position among the men—and buy access to the women, which was ultimately the only purpose of his endless battle for dominance.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There were other ways for primates to live, other kinds of societies that could be imagined. But once the pattern had been set, it was all but impossible to break.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousness was becoming more than just a tool for lying.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But even if it is true, even if we are governed by the legacy of an animal past, then it is up to us to behave as if it were not so.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You aren’t doing much for morale, Sidewise.” Sidewise shot back, “And what about my morale? It does me no damn good to ignore what’s blindingly obvious all around us.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyhow, that’s our story. And I think, in my glimpses of the great encompassing mechanism that has shaped us all, I’ve seen a little of the numinous. That’s enough of God for me.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Francis Bacon, who died in the seventeenth century, argued strongly that philosophy and theology should be kept separate, and that we should concentrate our studies on the local problems and the interconnections between material and efficient causes. Final-cause analysis was just a distraction: ‘Inquiry into final causes is sterile, and, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing.’”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Buffon’s work created a great furore, of course. The theologians at the Sorbonne condemned him, and Buffon dutifully retracted. But he wasn’t sincere: ‘It is better to be humble than hanged.’”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘He set no great value on money, or, perhaps, to speak properly, he set on it no more than its true value.’”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In his reliance on evidence, preferably obtained at first hand, Hutton was showing the way to the geological methods of the future.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Despite his friendship with Adam Smith, he believed in government intervention in agriculture, as it was too important to be left to market forces and chance: ‘The husbandman maintains the nation in all its ease, its affluence and its splendour,’ he wrote. But farmers too had a responsibility for the public good. Rotation of crops, ensuring equal acreages of different crops at any given time, would help keep prices stable.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.’”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His overriding lesson for thinkers like Hutton was that scientists, even those occupied by an apparently ‘concrete’ discipline like geology, need to be careful not just about what they claim to know but also about how they claim to know it. Human reason is a fragile thing and prone to be overthrown by suggestibility.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘If, in pursuing this object, we employ our skill in research, not in forming vain conjectures; and if data are to be found, on which Science may form just conclusions, we should not long remain in ignorance with respect to the natural history of this Earth, a subject on which hitherto opinion only, and not evidence, has decided. For in no subject is there naturally less defect of evidence, although philosophers, led by prejudice, or misguided by false theory, have neglected to employ that light by which they should have seen the system of the world.’”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.’”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Darwin had found a way in which a species could be shaped to fit its environment—not by divine intervention, not by mind, but through the steady, relentless working of natural law. Just like the Huttonian prescription for the Earth, it was a Newtonian scheme for life. For better or worse, Darwin transformed our view of our place in the universe. Humans too are not the outcome of a divine design, but simply products of the relentless workings of natural laws, just like rivers and mountains, beetles and whales.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humans and their petty doings come and go, but the geology endures.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She was doing well with her schooling, scoring high in mathematics, sciences and deductive abilities, as well as in physical prowess and leadership skills. Her father had been paradoxically pleased when she had been flagged up with a warning about having introvert tendencies. “All great scientists are introverts,” he said. “All great engineers too, come to that. The sign of a strong, independent mind.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was always the same with engineers, Stef had observed; nothing made them happier than to be given a well-defined and achievable task, and to be left alone to get on with it.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you were anywhere near the center of human affairs, even to the extent that she was, your predominant emotion had to be disappointment at the way in which an age when opportunities for humanity had never been greater, old flaws—territorialism, combativeness, reluctance to transcend cultural barriers, a sheer inability simply to see things from the other guy’s point of view—looked set to bring the sky crashing down on all their heads.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know the military. The sooner they can kick a problem upstairs the happier they will be.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We underestimated the vindictiveness of mankind. Their retrospective tribunals. Their visiting of punishments on the children of the perpetrators. They never forgave us.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let me face bare-handed a dozen highly trained and fully armed gladiators, each with a personal grudge against me, than a lawyer with a single pointed question.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse— In the chthonic silence— All that could have been done had been done. In peace and satisfaction, minds diffuse and antique submitted to the End Time.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If this was the basis of the faith of the Friends, then no wonder the Friends were so remote, so intense—so careless of their everyday lives, of the pain and death of others. History as it existed was nothing more than a shabby prototype of the global optimization to come, when the Ultimate Observer discarded all inferior worldlines. And no wonder then, he thought, the Friends were so leached of humanity. Their mystical vision had removed all significance from their own lives—the only lives they could experience, whatever the truth of their philosophy—and it had rendered them deeply flawed, less than human. He opened his eyes and studied Shira. He saw again the patient intensity which resided inside this fragile girl—and he saw now how damaged she was by her philosophy. She was not fully alive, and perhaps never could be; he pitied her, he realized.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why should it be so? It was as if humans built such places as this with the sole purpose of finding ways to dominate each other. Muub listened to Adda’s clumsy explanation of this. “But it’s inevitable,” he said, his face neutral. “You have to have organization—hierarchy—if you are to run the complex, interlinking systems which sustain a society like the City with its hinterland. And only within such a society can man afford art, science, wisdom—even leisure of the most brutish sort, like these Games. And with hierarchies comes power.” He smiled at Adda, condescending once more. “People aren’t very noble, upfluxer. Look around you. Their darker side will find expression in any situation where they can best each other.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One might imagine that, in any conflict between rational humans and religious humans, the rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet—at least up to our nineteenth century—the religious tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep—it has sometimes seemed to me—capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher. The paradox is explained because religion provides a goal for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of “sacred” land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you were part of a group there was always the chance that the predator would take the next guy, not you. It was a cold-blooded lottery that paid off often enough to be worthwhile adapting for. But there were disadvantages to group living: mainly, if there were large numbers of you, there was increased competition for food. As that competition resolved itself, the inevitable result was social complexity—and the size of the adapids’ brains had increased so that they were capable of handling that complexity. Then, of course, they were forced to become even more efficient at searching for food to fuel those big brains. It was the way of the future. As primate societies became ever more complex, a kind of cognitive arms race would continue, increasing smartness fueled by increasing social complications.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the longest of timescales, over millions of years, the workings of chance defied human intuition. Humans were equipped with a subjective consciousness of risk and improbability suitable for creatures with a lifespan of less than a century or so. Event that came much less frequently than that—such as asteroid impacts—were place, in human minds, in the category not of rare, but of never. But the impacts happened even so, and to a creature with a lifespan of, say, ten million years, would not have seemed so improbable at all. Given enough time even such unlikely events as ocean crossings from Africa to South America would inevitably occur, over and again, and would shape the destiny of life.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A growing belief that behind every event lay intention—be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky—was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even the right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was—Honorius had explained to his pupil—as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem. “You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading—even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth. But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here. Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness. I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this. So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing mankind had done in its short and bloody history had made the slightest bit of difference to this patient geographical realignment. Meanwhile the Earth, left to its own devices, had deployed a variety of healing mechanisms, physical, chemical, biological, and geological, to recover from the devastating interventions of its human inhabitants. Air pollutants had been broken up by sunlight and dispersed. Bog ore had absorbed much metallic waste. Vegetation had recolonized abandoned landscapes, roots breaking up concrete and asphalt, overgrowing ditches and canals. Erosion by wind and water had caused the final collapse of the last structures, washing it all into sand. Meanwhile the relentless processes of variation and selection had worked to fill an empty world.”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...Why Nimrod? Why that name?" Ramrod straight, he looked down at her. "I guess you skipped Bible studies at school. Genesis 10, verses 8 to 10: 'And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth... And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and-" "Babel?" "It was only generations after the flood of Noah. Chapter 11, verse 4. 'And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.'" "But God struck them down when they built the tower." "Yes. But why? 11, 6. Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. That's what God said about mankind. He feared us, and so He struck us down. We have that verse up on the wall on big banners, to motivate the workforce. 'Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.'" "Wow," Thandie said. "You're challenging God?" "Why the hell not?”
Stephen Baxter (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source