Stephen Baxter citáty

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Stephen Baxter

Datum narození: 13. listopad 1957

Stephen Baxter je britský autor hard science fiction. Vystudoval matematiku a strojařství.

Citáty Stephen Baxter

„But Parz was better than nothing: it offered stability, regulation, a framework to live in. People gripe about their tithes—and nobody’s going to pretend that the Committee gets it right all the time—but most of us would prefer taxes to living wild. With all respect to you, my friend.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Flux

He bit into his cake. “And that’s still true today; as true as it ever was.”

Flux (novel) (1993), Chapter 20 (p. 497)

„You’re a damn fool, boy. I want you to know that now, in case I don’t get a chance to tell you later.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Flux

Zdroj: Flux (novel) (1993), Chapter 27 (p. 554)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section I (p. 113)

„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?“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (pp. 509-510)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter

Zdroj: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 14, “We have now got to the end of our reasoning” (p. 130)

„In his reliance on evidence, preferably obtained at first hand, Hutton was showing the way to the geological methods of the future.“

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— Stephen Baxter

Zdroj: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 8, “A cursed country where one has to shape everything out of a block” (p. 70)

„The rodents’ vast litters incidentally offered up much raw material to the blind sculptors of natural selection; their evolutionary rate was ferocious.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section III (p. 132)

„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.”“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 502)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section IV (pp. 370-371)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 6 “The Crossing” section IV (p. 185)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 501)

„What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (p. 513)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 9 “The Walkers” section I (p. 256)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 5 “The Time of Long Shadows” section II (pp. 120-121)

„Bex shrugged. “You think anybody’s going to listen to a bunch of scientists? No offense. But nobody has so far.”“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Prologue (p. 6)
Evolution (2002)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 13 “Last Contact” section I (pp. 406-407)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 9 “The Walkers” section I (p. 257)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 18 “The Kingdom of the Rats” section II (p. 579)

„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.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section II (p. 525)

„For the genes it made sense, of course. Otherwise it would not have happened.“

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— Stephen Baxter, kniha Evolution

Zdroj: Evolution (2002), Chapter 18 “The Kingdom of the Rats” section III (p. 597)

„Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Etiam egestas wisi a erat. Morbi imperdiet, mauris ac auctor dictum.“

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Stephen Baxter citáty

Stephen Baxter

Citáty Stephen Baxter

Help us translate English quotes

„Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Etiam egestas wisi a erat. Morbi imperdiet, mauris ac auctor dictum.“

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