Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

This lost planet is in fact not lost, but rather a part of all of us. Theia’s atoms are in every body of every human.

It’s the process of exploration itself that fascinates us, not the places we explore.

‘The history of humanity is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.’

you make a certain kind of molecule that combines particular kinds of atoms, you can heat and chill them such that the colder atom in the molecule gives its heat to the hotter one, which breaks entropy and is like a little instance of time going backward. Also, if you do the half-silvered mirror experiment in a certain way, it’s like the two-slit experiment, in that you can tweak it to get either wave results or particle results, but in this version of it, if you tweak the device after the photon has gone through the mirror, it retroactively changes what happened at the mirror. So it’s like you’ve changed the past.”

He thought about how fermions had to rotate 720 degrees before they returned to their original position.

When you were stunned by the fact that a fermion rotated 720 degrees before returning to its original position, you did not need to hang by your fingers and toes from a cliff to get your thrills.

We think in pairs and quadrants, and in threes and nines, and every concept has its opposite embedded in it as part of its definition.

The moon is death it will kill you Bony dust on bony rocks No trees no air no clouds no creatures Nothing alive not even dirt Harsh and sterile cold and bright Look at it and tremble You think you are an earthly person You think you are alive And in this moment maybe you are But the moon teaches you Another day will come

Obviously you had to be alive to suffer.