Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head.

We will come back. And that’s the real answer, Enrique. Will we survive? Yeah. It’ll be touch and go, but we will survive. Will we build space habitats? Absolutely. Small ones at first, big ones later. But that’s not the real goal. The real goal will take thousands of years. The real goal is to build Earth again, and build it better.”

The choice was explained in terms of Markus’s dynamic leadership style, his charisma, and other such buzzwords that, as everyone understood, boiled down to the fact that he was a man. Ivy had failed, in the eyes of the Russians and of many in the NASA hierarchy, by not taking a firmer hand with Sean Probst. That wasn’t the only complaint they had about her, but it was the one around which everything else had crystallized. Once everyone had begun to see her as the overly book-smart, well-meaning but weak-kneed technocrat, everything she did had been viewed through that lens.

“You’re assuming,” Luisa said, “that she has a plan. I doubt that she does. She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward.” Doob pulled his tablet closer and started trying to find Tav’s blog. “To what extent do you imagine she really is reporting facts about the AC? As opposed to creating the reality she describes?” Doob asked. “What’s the difference?” Luisa asked.

The details, the sudden distractions and improvisations, piled up and thickened in a way that made Dinah think of a sonic boom on Old Earth: the onrushing stream of air thickening and solidifying in the path of the airplane, turning into a barrier that must be broken through or succumbed to.

living in habitats was safer and more comfortable anyway than the unpredictable surface of a planet. The human races could enjoy thousands of years of safe, secure habitat life while slowly re-creating ecosystems down below that would resemble those of Old Earth.

It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software. The density with which they’d been able to pack transistors onto chips still had not been matched by any fabrication plant now in existence.

It was unfair, of course, for billions of people to focus blame on one representative of his culture who had died in a bad way five thousand years ago. The Epic, however, tended to have this effect on people’s thinking. In the same way that certain people of Old Earth, raised on the Bible, would have referred to masturbation as the Sin of Onan, those of the modern world tended to classify personal virtues and failings in terms of well-known historical figures from the era of the Cloud Ark, the Big Ride, and the first generations on Cleft. Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties.

Since Cradle was confined to the equator, green things grew there so luxuriantly that they had to be kept in check by hordes of little grabbs with pruning bill hands.

It was an artificial atmosphere. The human races had bombarded the parched and dead surface of the planet with comet cores for hundreds of years just to bring the sea level up to where they wanted it. Then they had infected that water with organisms genetically engineered to produce the balance of gases needed to support life—and, having done that, to commit suicide, so that their biomass could be used as nutrients for the next wave of atmosphere-building creatures.

Do these physics work?

“Well, as you can see, they are something else,” Doc said. He raised his voice slightly, addressing the whole group. “Now that we’ve had some time for the shock to wear off, I think you all understand what we are looking at. These people are not descendants of the Seven Eves. They are rootstock. Their ancestors survived the Hard Rain and somehow found a way to live belowground until quite recently. Most likely they are cousins of yours, Tyuratam Lake.” It took Ty a few moments to understand that Doc was alluding to events five thousand years in the past. “By way of Rufus MacQuarie?” he said.

“But Blue hasn’t put out a countervailing narrative yet either.” “It isn’t Blue’s strong suit.” Arjun sighed. “Never has been, right? We’re technocrats. We make decisions like engineers. Which doesn’t always line up with what people imagine they want.”

“Selective breeding,” Sonar insisted. “If wolves could become poodles in a few thousand years, think what humans could turn into, if there was a need!

Less than that according to the fox experiment