Quotes from Stephen Baxter

It was a cold-blooded lottery that paid off often enough to be worthwhile adapting for.

And if you were part of a group there was always the chance that the predator would take the next guy, not you.

All the condylarths were doomed to extinction ten million years before the age of mankind. But for now they were in their pomp, top predators of the world forest.

This was the Mars that inspired some of the greatest works early science fiction, including H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1897), in which the Martians reverse the Avatar story where aliens come to our world for its resources-including human blood! and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels, beginning wi A Princess of Mars, serialised from 1912.

Water in space would be hugely valuable, far more so the gold, given the cost of hauling water up from Earth. On b moon, water would support life, and using electrolysis (pass ing an electric current through it) water can be broken dow into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel. The moon could become a filling station outside Earth's deep gravity field that could be used to support a general expansion ins the solar system, just as was dreamed of before Apollo.

Maybe it doesn't have to be the way Jake Sully bleakly summarized it to Eywa. Maybe there is a way for us to keep the Earth green, without giving up our civilization and all the benefits it brings: by using the resources of space.

The challenge of detecting worlds beyond our bubble, because planets are small and faint compared to parent suns.

This is the way I think the world will end—with general giggling by all the witty heads, who think it is a joke.' Kierkegaard.

She was capable of suffering – that was the price of sentience.

What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time? WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The Substrate which lay under the whole world.

But in that space were crammed humans, not animals.

He'd gotten into a fight with his sister, Splayfoot, over a particularly juicy dwarf willow he'd found. Just as he had prised the branches from the ground and had begun to strip them of their succulent leaves, the calf had come bustling over to him and had tried to push him away so she could get at the willow herself. His willow.

There were no more nations, but there were neighbourhoods, regions, zones, and a hierarchy of councils, parliaments and congresses: talking shops, all the way up to some kind of world-government council. This system was what they called the Common Heritage. He wondered vaguely if this had evolved from a form of emergency organisation in the refugee days – the 'Chaos' – maybe built on some elements of the old UN.

Something had changed. History resumed.

After the emergence of intelligence, the story of any biosphere tended to get a lot simpler. It was a major reason for the silence of the stars.

Every human is allowed to be sentimental about a spring day in New York. It's our birthright.

The triumph of my logic gives me no pleasure.

There is grandeur in this view of life . . . that . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

A flower of light pointlessly beautiful.

But there have only ever been fewer than two hundred billion human beings

Earth was the first planet to be terraformed.

We don't come into the world fully made, like the birds and the mice. We have to learn how to live.

But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions, which is just as well, or it wouldn't be much of a career path, would it?