Space Quotes

“Is it really conceivable, given all of that immensity, all that structure, that we are truly alone? That life emerged here, and nowhere else?”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Thinking about paradoxes is the way human understanding advances. I think the Fermi paradox is telling us something very profound about the universe, and our place in it.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“The Earth gave you life, gave you food and language and intelligence, and will take you back when you die.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Above them, a ceiling of curdled light spanned the sky. It was a galaxy. It was a disc of stars, flatter and thinner than she might have expected, in proportion to its width no thicker than a few sheets of paper. She thought she could see strata in that disc, layers of structure, a central sheet of swarming blue stars and dust lanes sandwiched between dimmer, older stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc like an egg yolk, was a compact mass of yellowish light; but it was not spherical, rather markedly elliptical. The spiral arms were fragmented. They were a delicate blue laced with ruby-red nebulae and the blue-white blaze of individual stars—a granularity of light—and with dark lanes traced between each arm. She saw scattered flashes of light, blisters of gas. Perhaps those were supernova explosions, creating bubbles of hot plasma hundreds of light-years across. But the familiar disc—shining core, spiral arms—was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim red stars. The crimson fireflies were gathered in great clusters, each of which must contain millions of stars.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“At the center of the Galaxy there was a cavity, blown clear by the ferocious wind from a monstrous black hole. The cavity was laced by gas and dust, particles ionized and driven to high speeds by the ferocious gravitational and magnetic forces working here, so that streamers of glowing gas crisscrossed the cavity in a fine tracery. Stars had been born here, notably a cluster of blue-hot young stars just a fraction away from the black hole itself. And here and there rogue stars fell through the cavity—and they dragged streaming trails behind them, glowing brilliantly, like comets a hundred light-years long. Stars like comets.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“She glanced around the sky. She was a hundred light-years from home, a hundred light-years in toward the center of the Galaxy, roughly along a line that would have joined Earth to Antares, in Scorpio. But the sky was dark, dismal. There were no asteroid belts, only a handful of comets left orbiting farther out, and two gas giants both stripped of their volatiles, reduced to smooth rocky balls. She was well inside the interstellar colonization wave front that appeared to be sweeping out along the spiral arm and was nearing Earth, a hundred light-years back. And this was a typical post-wave-front system: colonized, ferociously robbed of its resources by one shortsighted, low-tech predatory strategy or another, trashed, abandoned. Even the stars had been obscured, their light stolen by Dyson masks: dense orbiting habitat clouds, even solid spheres, asteroids and planets dismantled and made into traps for every stray photon. It was a depressing sight: an engineered sky, a sky full of scaffolding and ruins. Earth’s sky was primeval, comparatively. This was a glimpse of the future, for Earth.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“On the last day of its long flight, Gurrutu, engines blazing, swept around the limb of Neptune. The maneuver occurred in complete silence, and as Madeleine watched the huge world swim past her, it was as if she were flying through some cold, dark, gigantic cathedral. And there was Triton, already bright and growing brighter, a pink-white pearl floating in emptiness. The final approach to Triton was a challenge for the navigation routines. Triton, uniquely among the Solar System’s larger moons, orbited Neptune in a retrograde manner, opposite to the spin of Neptune itself. And Triton’s orbit was severely pitched up, some twenty degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic. It was thought these eccentricities of Triton were a relic of its peculiar origin: It had once been an independent body, like Pluto, but had been captured by Neptune, perhaps by impact with another moon or by grazing Neptune’s atmosphere, a catastrophic event that had resulted in global melting before the moon had learned to endure its entrapment. Gurrutu entered a looping elliptical orbit. Madeleine watched as a surface of crumpled, pink-streaked water ice rolled beneath the craft. Triton’s misty twilight was marked by a single, yellow, man-made beacon: at the site of Kasyapa Township, home to Ben Roach’s people. They were not alone in Triton orbit. Many emigrant transport ships, of the same design as Gurrutu, still circled here. Others had been driven into the surface, to be broken up for raw materials.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“She smiled at them coldly. “I heard that in Spain and France people have gone back to the caves, where the art still survives from the last Ice Age. And they are adding new layers of painting, of the animals they see around them. Maybe it was all a dream, do you think? The warm period, the interglacial, our civilization. Maybe all that matters is the ice, and the cave.” As the light failed, and the inhabited Moon brightened, they drank a series of toasts: to Venus, to the Chaera, to Earth, to the ice.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“They would have to spend a month in Earth orbit, working on Gurrutu. The colony craft was decades old, and showing its age. Gurrutu had been improvised from the liquid-propellant core booster of an Ariane 12 rocket. It was a simple cylinder, with the fuel tanks inside refurbished and made habitable. The main living area of Gurrutu was a big hydrogen tank, with a smaller oxygen tank used for storage. A fireman’s pole ran the length of the hydrogen tank, up through a series of mesh floor partitions to an instrument cluster. Big, fragile-looking, solar-cell wings had been fixed to the exterior. But reconditioned fission reactors provided power in the dimly lit outer reaches of the Solar System. These were old technology: heavy Soviet-era antiques of a design called Topaz. Each Topaz was a clutter of pipes and tubing and control rods set atop a big radiator cone of corrugated aluminum. There was a docking mount and an instrument module at one end of the core booster, and a cluster of ion rockets at the other. The ion thrusters were suitable for missions of long duration: missions measured in years, to the outer planets and beyond. And they worked; they had ferried the Yolgnu to Triton. But the ion thrusters needed much refurbishment. And they, too, were old technology. The newest Lunar Japanese helium-3 fusion drives were, Madeleine learned, much more effective. It wouldn’t be a comfortable ride out to Neptune. The toilets never seemed to vent properly. There was a chorus of bangs, wheezes, and rattles when they tried to sleep. The solar panels had steadily degraded so that there was never enough power, even this close to the Sun. Madeleine soon tired of half-heated meals, lukewarm coffee, and tepid bathing water.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“To launch his new project, Frank, feverish with enthusiasm, had hired the Grand Auditorium, the heart of Landsberg. The crater’s dome was a blue ceiling above Xenia, a thick double sheet of quasiglass, cable-stayed by engineered spiderweb, filled with water. The water shielded Landsberg’s inhabitants from radiation and served to scatter the raw sunlight. During the long lunar day, here in Landsberg, the sky was royal blue and full of fish: goldfish and carp. After five years, Xenia still couldn’t get used to it.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“bathed him. He leaned forward inside his stiff HUT unit, so he could look up. The artifact had come to life. The electric blue light was glowing from the substance of the circle itself. He could see speckles in the light. Coherent, then. And when he looked down at his suit, he saw how the white fabric was crisscrossed by the passage of dozens of points of electric blue glow. Lasers. Was he being scanned? “This changes everything,” he said. The blue light increased in intensity, until it blinded him. There was a single instant of pain—”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“There was no huge mother ship emitting asteroid-factory drones. Just this enigmatic artifact.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“It was just a hoop, some kind of metal perhaps, facing the Sun. It was around thirty meters across, and it was sky blue, the color dazzling out here in the void. It was silent, not transmitting on any frequency, barely visible at all in the light of the point-source Sun.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Beyond the windows now there was only blackness falling between Malenfant and the stars. At five hundred astronomical units from the Sun, he was far beyond the last of the planets; even Pluto reached only some forty astronomical units. His only companions out here were the enigmatic ice moons of the Kuiper Belt, fragments of rock and ice left undisturbed since the birth of the Sun, each of them surrounded by an emptiness wider than all the inner Solar System. Farther beyond lay the Oort cloud, the shadowy shell of deep-space comets; but the Oort’s inner border, at some thirty thousand astronomical units, was beyond even the reach of this attenuated mission.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Jesus, Malenfant. You’re a kind of gray cyborg, aren’t you? You’re really determined.” “Look, microgravity is actually a pretty forgiving environment for an old man.” “Until you want to return to a full Earth gravity.” “Well, maybe I don’t.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“It was all crude and clunky, but—unlike the fancier systems American engineers had developed for the space station—it had been proven, over decades, actually to work in space, and to be capable of being repaired when it broke down. Still, Malenfant had brought along two of most things, and an extensive tool kit.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Much of the key equipment was of Russian design—the recycling systems, for instance. He had big generators called Elektrons that could produce oxygen from water distilled from his urine. Drinking water was recovered from humidity in the air. There was a system of scrubbers called Vozdukh that removed carbon dioxide from the air. He had a backup oxygen generator system based on the use of “candles”—big cylinders containing a chemical called lithium perchlorate that, when heated, gave off oxygen. He had emergency oxygen masks that worked on the same principle. And so on.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“His hab module was a shoebox, big enough for him to stand up straight. He drenched it with light from metal halide lamps, hot white light like sunlight, to keep the blues away. The walls were racks that held recovery units, designed for easy replacement. There were wires and cables and ducts running along the corners of the hab module and across the walls. A robot spider called Charlotte ran along the wires, cleaning and sucking dust out of the air. Despite his best efforts, the whole place was soon messy and cluttered, like an overused utility room. Gear was scattered everywhere, stuck to the floor and walls and ceiling with straps and Velcro. If he brushed against a wall he could cause an eruption of gear, of pens and softscreens and clipboards and data discs and equipment components, and food cans and toothpaste and socks.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“The acceleration of the craft was low, just a few percent of gravity. But it was able to sustain that thrust for a long time—years, in fact—and once the Perry had escaped lunar orbit, its velocity mounted inexorably. Within, Reid Malenfant settled down to the routines of long-duration spaceflight.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“The Perry looped through an elliptical two-hour orbit around the Moon. On the lunar surface, the lights of the spreading Japanese colonies and helium-3 mines glittered. The completed ship was a stack of components fifty meters long. At its base was a massive, reinforced pusher plate, mounted on a shock-absorbing mechanism of springs and crushable aluminum posts. The main body of the craft was a cluster of fuel magazines. Big superconducting hoops encircled the whole stack. Now pellets of helium-3 and deuterium were fired out of the back of the craft, behind the pusher plate. They formed a target the size of a full stop. A bank of carbon dioxide lasers fired converging beams at the target. There was a fusion pulse, lasting 250 nanoseconds. And then another, and another. Three hundred microexplosions each second hurled energy against the pusher plate. Slowly, ponderously, the craft was driven forward. From Earth, the new Moon was made brilliant by fusion fire.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“This is NASA’s Solar System Exploration Division. Right? So, now we need to go do some exploring.” “NASA doesn’t exist anymore,” she said. “Not as you knew it, when you were flying shuttle. The JSC is run by the Department of Agriculture—”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“The Alpha Centauri signal—though the first, picked up a year ago—was no longer unique. Whispers in the radio wavebands had been detected across the sky: from Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Sirius, Luyten 726-8—the nearby stars, the Sun’s close neighbors, the first destinations planned in a hundred interstellar-colonization studies, homes of civilizations dreamed of in a thousand science fiction novels. One by one, the stars were coming out. There were patterns to the distribution. No star farther than around nine light-years away had yet lit up with radio signals. But the signals weren’t uniform. They weren’t of the same type, or even on the same frequencies; such differences were just as confusing as the very existence of the signals. And meanwhile the Gaijin, the Solar System’s new residents, remained quiet: They seemed to be producing no electromagnetic output but the infrared of their waste heat. It was as if a wave of colonization had abruptly reached this part of the Galaxy, this remote corner of a ragged spiral arm, and diverse creatures—or machines—were busily digging in, building, perhaps breeding, perhaps dying. Nobody knew how the colonists had gotten here. Nobody could even guess why they had come now. But it seemed to Maura that already one fact was clear about the presumed galactic community: it was messy and diverse, just as much as the human communities of Earth, if not more. In a way, she supposed, that was even healthy. If communities separated by light years had turned out to be identical, it would be an oppressive sky indeed. But it was sure going to make figuring out the meaning of it all a lot more difficult.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Of course they don’t come from Centauri,” Nemoto said. “Why would they suddenly start making such a radio clatter if that was so? No, Malenfant. They only just arrived in the Centauri system. Just as they only just arrived here. Apparently we are watching the vanguard of a wave of colonization, Malenfant, extending far from our system.” “But—” Nemoto waved a delicate hand before her face. “But that isn’t important, Malenfant. None of this is. Not even the activity in the asteroids.” “Then what is?” “I have determined the nature of the Gaijin’s prime radiant, here in the Solar System.” “The nature? You said it is a thousand AU out. What’s out there to have a nature at all?” “A solar focus,” Nemoto said. “A what?” “That far out is where you will find the focal points of the Sun’s gravitational field. Images of remote stars, magnified by gravitational lensing. And the star that is focused at the Gaijin prime radiant is—” “Alpha Centauri?” The stubbly hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. “You see, Malenfant?” she said grimly. “Any number of probes to the belt won’t answer the fundamental questions.” “No.” Malenfant shook his head, mind racing. “We’ve got to send somebody out there. Through a thousand AU; out to the solar focus … But that’s impossible.” “Nevertheless that is the challenge, Malenfant. There—at the solar focus—is where the answers will be found. That is where we must go.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“But yes, incrementally: that was the key word. Even these lunar colonists couldn’t see beyond their current projects, the next few years, their own lifetimes. They couldn’t see where this could all lead. To Malenfant, that ultimate destination was everything.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“But it was actually a tree, a variety of oak. The oaks were capable of growing to two hundred meters under the Moon’s gentle gravity, but this one had been bred for width, and was full of intersecting hollowed-out chambers. The walls of this room were of smooth-polished wood, broken only subtly by technology—lights, air vents, virtual-display gear—and the canned air here was fresh and moist and alive. In contrast to the older parts of Edo—all those clunky tunnels—this was the future of the Moon, the Japanese were implicitly saying. The living Moon. What the hell was an American doing here on the Moon, lecturing these patient Japanese about colonizing space? The Japanese were doing it, patiently and incrementally working.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Of course, everything is different now.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“But none of these filtering mechanisms convinces me. You see, you have to believe that this magic suppression mechanism, whatever it is, works for every race in this huge Galaxy of ours. All it would take would be for one race to survive the wars, or evade the vacuum robots, or come sneaking through the quarantine to sell trinkets to the natives—or even just to start broadcasting some ET version of The Simpsons, anywhere in the Galaxy—and we’d surely see or hear them. But we don’t. This paradox was first stated clearly by a twentieth-century physicist called Enrico Fermi. It strikes me as a genuine mystery. The contradictions are basic: Life seems capable of emerging everywhere; just one star-faring race could easily have covered the Galaxy by now; the whole thing seems inevitable—but it hasn’t happened. Thinking about paradoxes is the way human understanding advances. I think the Fermi paradox is telling us something very profound about the universe, and our place in it. Or was.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“We can think of lots of rationalizations for this absence. Maybe there is something that kills off every civilization like ours before we get too far—for example, maybe we all destroy ourselves in nuclear wars or eco collapse. Or maybe there is something more sinister: plagues of killer robots sliding silently between the stars, killing off fledgling cultures for their own antique purposes. Or maybe the answer is more benevolent. Maybe we’re in some kind of quarantine—or a zoo.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“Even we blare out on radio frequencies. Why, with our giant radio telescopes we could detect a civilization no more advanced than ours anywhere in the Galaxy. But we don’t. More advanced civilizations ought to be much more noticeable. We could spot somebody building a shell around their star, or throwing in nuclear waste. We could probably see evidence of such things even in other galaxies. But we don’t. Those other galaxies, other islands of stars, seem to be as barren as this one. Maybe we’re just unlucky. Maybe we’re living at the wrong time. The Galaxy is an old place; maybe They have been, flourished, and gone already. But consider this: Even if They are long gone, surely we should see Their mighty ruins, all around us. But we don’t even see that. The stars show no signs of engineering. The Solar System appears to be primordial, in the sense that it shows no signs of the great projects we can already envisage, like terraforming the planets, or tinkering with the Sun, and so on.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space

“The universe is a big place. There are huge spaces between the stars. But it’s not that big. Even crawling along with dinky ships that only reach a fraction of light speed—ships we could easily start building now—we could colonize the Galaxy in a few tens of millions of years. One hundred million, tops. One hundred million years. It seems an immense time—after all, one hundred million years ago the dinosaurs ruled Earth. But the Galaxy is one hundred times older still. There has been time for Galactic colonization to have happened many times since the birth of the stars. Remember, all it takes is for one race somewhere to have evolved the will and the means to colonize; and once the process has started it’s hard to see what could stop it. But, as a kid on that lawn, I didn’t see them. I seemed to be surrounded by emptiness and silence.”
― Stephen Baxter, Space