Losing Mars Quotes

“If we ever make contact with another intelligent species out there, they’re going to scratch their heads at how utterly ridiculous we are with all the meaningless distinctions we make. Straight/Gay. Black/White. Male/Female. Rich/Poor. And what’s more, we use these to ignore the things that are really important—compassion, kindness, consideration.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Far from being empty, space is more like a snooker table. Stars explode or collide and that’s the white ball being smacked with the cue stick. Individual atoms go flying off at close to the speed of light. Regardless of how small they are, anything traveling that fast is dangerous. Even though space is a vacuum, given enough time, atoms will eventually collide with each other and—bang—the cosmic game of snooker just got interesting. Protons, neutrons and electrons scatter again, speeding along until they hit something else. If that something else happens to be alive, that’s bad—destroying cell walls and damaging DNA.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“For every two steps we’ve taken in advancing our own civilization, we’ve stepped back at least once, embracing our primitive nature, becoming more efficient at killing, more adept at slaughtering each other. Is that the curse of intelligence? Is violence a universal constant?”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Luck is never accommodating, right? Just a big smattering of probabilities that sometimes collide.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“It’s simple math, you know. Classic bell curve. Normal distribution. Most people are going to pile up in the middle, not going anywhere, but there’ll be a handful of outliers that go high and low, often for inexplicable reasons. Point is, even survivors don’t really understand why they survive—they just do.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Humans might be difficult to transport between planets but seeds are ideal—small and lightweight. If only humans could be grown in-situ. One day, they will.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Like most astronauts, I made the mistake of asking about safety during training. My instructor tried not to laugh. “The abort system produces eighteen to twenty gees as it catapults you the hell away from any fireball, but it’s a mixed blessing. How safe would it be to pile eighteen to twenty people directly on top of you? You’ll probably survive. Probably. But you won’t be walking away from an abort.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Science is an attempt to remove our emotions and ego from reality.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“In generations to come, Martian parents are going to hold their kid’s birthday parties on Phobos. It’ll be the inflatable bouncy castle of the 22nd century.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“A plane change in space is not unlike trying to hit the offramp of a freeway covered in black ice. Brakes do nothing. Accelerating spins the wheels. Regardless of what we do, the car’s going to continue sliding on down the lane, but with the steering turned hard and a whole lot of gas, we’ll gain a little sideways motion.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“waking up in space is akin to being struck by lightning. There’s no electric shock, as such, rather the shock of suddenly being aware of falling.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Dad was mercurial, swinging between extremes. Guilty and full of remorse one day, drunk as a skunk the next. I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t. I could see the same traits welling up within me, and that scared me. I didn’t want to turn out like him. I was desperate to be better. Explains a lot about my life, really, but he had this poem hanging on the wall of our living room. I guess it was a prayer. Lord, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Orbits are strange beasts. Rather than escaping the gravity of Mars, we’re surrendering to it, albeit at a speed and distance that allows us to fall around the planet. Like passengers in an elevator with the cable severed, we’re plummeting toward the ground, only we’re going sideways so fast we keep missing the planet.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Give me coffee for the things I can change, and tequila for those I can’t.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“It sounds strange, but dust management will be a big deal for future explorers.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Space flight has always been about trusting science over entropy—Yuri, Alan, John, and Neil all walked the same line we do here on Mars.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“There’s something therapeutic about privacy. For me, it’s the sanctity of self, the ability to be alone, to be myself and not on show.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“We’re human—that’s it. That’s all that’s necessary. We shouldn’t need anything else. No other categories apply, really. Nothing else matters. But we want our neat little boxes, our pigeonholes and norms. Only since there are no norms, we get all pissed when someone else isn’t exactly the same as us. It’s stupid. Petulant, really. Utterly childish.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“you spend far more time planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how to cope with them, than you do for things to go right.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“There’s a garbled reply, which I hope means they can hear me.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“That poem doesn’t say I have to like accepting the things I cannot change, just that I have no other choice. Anxiety is the antithesis, maintaining an illusion that somehow stress can make a difference, when it can’t. I can’t lie to myself.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Are we still screwing around with the same dumb shit that always trips us up? The color of someone’s skin? Their sex? Or the shitty patch of ground on which they were born?”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“So a few species go extinct. Who cares? So long as beer’s cheap, what difference does it make? War with Russia. War with Iran. War with Afghanistan. It’s like this century has been a re-run of the past. Bombs are still the solution, apparently. We’ve got new toys, old problems.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“but there are two problems with that approach. First, rapid-pace stories miss the essence of what good storytelling is about—character. Second, realism builds credibility.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“but there are two problems with that approach. First, rapid-pace stories miss the essence”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Unfortunately for Alan, his was a suborbital flight and, as the US was playing catch up with the Russians, it didn’t count with the media who called it a “modest leap compared with… Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union.” They described Alan’s splashdown as dropping “gently to the water.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“two words: Choose wisely.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“It’s not wise to yell in the jungle.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“Enterprise. Picard. Two to beam up!”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars

“After fifty years, I’m pretty damn good at lying, but having seen heartache and triumph in my own life, I’m convinced—no one should know what tomorrow holds, be that tears or joy. To treasure each day is enough.”
― Peter Cawdron, Losing Mars