Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

He knew that self-made tech zillionaires liked to argue, that Pasadena aristocracy didn’t, and that society wives liked to be lectured to, as long as the lectures were brief and funny.

he’ll go back to his usual grousing about how his taxes are too high and the federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots.”

this created a certain perception of incompetence, or at least failure to perform, on the part of the astronomical profession whenever weird things happened in the sky. Which was every day, actually. But most of them could be seen only by astronomers and so they were able to keep them a sort of trade secret.

Doob, who had raised three children to adulthood, had figured out a long time ago that any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.

Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time.

if you bought into the idea that boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something that every parent who had ever raised a boy had to take seriously—then it was difficult to envision a lot of them spending their lives in tin cans.

Henry wasn’t a parent, and he didn’t understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep.

But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”

No one had ever really expected Ulrika to get picked, however. 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.

Pinned to her lapel was a loop of ribbon. All the important people had been wearing these for the last few weeks, and they had become popular among the hoi polloi as a gesture of solidarity with the mission of the Cloud Ark. Selecting the color scheme had consumed resources equivalent to the gross domestic product of a medium-sized country.

“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.”

“Is she nuts?” Ivy asked Luisa. “In a sense it doesn’t matter,” Luisa said. “If she’s making trouble, she’s making trouble. Tracing that to a diagnosable psychiatric condition doesn’t really change anything.”

she knew that this one thing—the urge to boast of one’s accomplishments—had betrayed more secrets and destroyed more careers than anything else.

And men simply were not as well suited to life in space. They were more biologically vulnerable to radiation. They needed more air and more food. And, whether it was the result of cultural upbringing or genetic programming, they simply were not cut out psychologically for the idea that they were going to spend the rest of their lives in crowded indoor spaces.

looking at her in the classic style of the extrovert who wants you to drop whatever you’re doing so that you can have a conversation with him.