The Swarm Quotes

“I'm a reasonable kind of guy. If I hear something that seems to make sense, I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. If the alternative explanation has to be pounded into shape before it fits the mould of our experience, it seems to me that it's unlikely to be true.”
― Frank Schatzing, The Swarm

“But I hope you’re not about to give me some kind of conspiracy theory. This is Norway, not America.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“Because it’s all about fear - fear of being alone, fear of never being asked and, worst of all, the fear of having a choice and making the wrong one.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“Children in America drew six-legged chickens because drumsticks came in packs of six, while adults drank milk from a carton, and recoiled at the sight of an udder. Their experience of the world was stunted, but it only fuelled their arrogance.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“And yet most people would be lost without the idea that life increases in value the more it resembles our own.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“It was the mystery that biologists from Darwin onwards had been longing to solve. How could we understand the ability of fish and seals to survive in the cold dark waters of the Antarctic? How could humans see inside a biotope that was sealed with layers of ice? What would the Earth look like from the sky, if we crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a goose? How did it feel to be a bee? How could we measure the speed of an insect’s wings and its heartbeat, or monitor its blood pressure and eating patterns? What was the impact of human activities, like shipping noise or subsea explosions, on mammals in the depths? How could we follow animals to places where no human could venture?”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“¿Qué puede pasar?» A veces uno tenía esos momentos. Demasiado metano e historias de monstruos. Por no hablar del clima. Tal vez tendría que haber desayunado mejor.”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“We’re so obsessed with assuring our own perpetuity that our goals seldom coincide with what would be good for humankind”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“You know the classic lines you get in sci-fi? Whatever it is, it’s coming our way, or Get me the President on the line? Well, there’s always the one about the enemy being superior, though by the end of the story you mostly feel cheated. This time you won’t. The yrr are superior.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“No, the Yrr haven’t changed the world. They’ve shown us how it really is.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm

“Just remember,’ she said, as she packed up her things, ‘I’m your superior.’

‘I’m sorry, honey, you can’t have heard right. We’re partners now, equals.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Not intellectually…’

She left the room.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm

“And you’re listening to signals from space?’

‘We target stars similar to our Sun – a thousand of them, each more than three billion years old. There are other projects like it, but ours is the crucial one.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

‘It’s not that amazing. You analyse whale song and try to figure out what they’re telling each other. We listen to noises from space because we’re convinced that the universe is packed with civilizations. I expect you’re having more luck with your whales.’

‘I’m dealing with a few oceans. You’ve got the universe.’

‘It’s on a different scale, but I’m always being told that we know less about the oceans than we do about space.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm

“obsessed with assuring our own perpetuity that our goals seldom coincide with what would be good for humankind.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“We live in an age of bacteria. For over three billion years they’ve existed in their present form. Humanity is just a passing fashion, but even when the sun explodes, somewhere, somehow, a few of those microbes are bound to survive. They’re the planet’s real success story, not humans.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“Your life doesn’t stop unfolding because you take a longer route. No time is wasted.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“La búsqueda de una inteligencia desconocida siempre es la búsqueda de la propia inteligencia. CARL SAGAN”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“Un ordenador, aunque sea una máquina sumamente precisa, no conoce las reglas empíricas, no actúa contra la lógica, no se preocupa del entorno y no tiene experiencias.”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“Hay formas similares de comunicación entre las bacterias. Por ejemplo en Myxococcus xanthus, una especie que vive en el suelo y que está formada por pequeñas asociaciones laxas. Cuando algunas células no encuentran alimento, emiten una especie de señal para indicar que sienten hambre. Al principio, la colonia prácticamente no reacciona, pero cuantas más células hambrientas hay, más intensa es la señal, hasta que supera un cierto umbral. Entonces, los miembros de la colonia comienzan a juntarse. Poco a poco se va formando una unión compleja de tipo multicelular, una unión fructífera que puede verse a simple vista. —”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“Desde 1959, los soviéticos han depositado en el Ártico cantidades inmensas de basura atómica, incluyendo reactores desguazados. Más de un millón de toneladas de armas químicas se amontonan en los fondos marinos, en profundidades que van de los quinientos a los cuatro mil quinientos metros. Especialmente peligrosos se consideran los contenedores de gases tóxicos hundidos en 1947 por orden de Moscú, que van dañándose lentamente debido a la corrosión. Frente a España están depositados cientos de miles de recipientes con residuos ligeramente radiactivos procedentes de la medicina, la investigación y la industria. En el Atlántico medio, a más de cuatro mil metros de profundidad, los investigadores marinos han comprobado la presencia de plutonio de las pruebas nucleares del sur del Pacífico. El Servicio Hidrográfico británico contabiliza 57.435 restos de naufragios en las profundidades oceánicas. Entre ellos, los pecios de varios submarinos atómicos americanos y rusos. El”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“Pese a la prohibición de 1994, se siguen arrojando desechos atómicos al mar. En el desagüe de la planta de reprocesamiento francesa de La Hague, los buzos de Greenpeace han verificado una radiactividad diecisiete millones de veces superior a la de las aguas no afectadas. En las aguas costeras de Noruega, las algas y los cangrejos están contaminados de tecnecio, un elemento radiactivo.”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“Ese mismo año, a la altura de las Falkland, el Endeavour, un barco de noventa metros de eslora, estuvo a merced de un fenómeno que la ciencia conoce como «las Tres Hermanas»: tres olas sucesivas, pegadas, de treinta metros de altura cada una. El Endeavour sufrió serios daños, pero logró llegar a puerto.”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“Ya se sabía que los meteoritos, los terremotos, las erupciones volcánicas y los maremotos habían transformado la imagen de la Tierra durante millones de años, pero se diría que por un acuerdo secreto ese tipo de acontecimientos habían terminado para siempre con el comienzo de la era tecnológica.”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“¿Acaso he estado tanto tiempo sentado frente a un escritorio que ya no puedo imaginar cómo es la realidad?»”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“Muchos investigadores eran así. Se los tildaba de aventureros, pero en realidad sólo aceptaban la aventura porque les permitía acceder al conocimiento.”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“Por ahora sólo puedo decirte en qué coinciden los expertos. —¿En qué? Johanson se reclinó hacia atrás y cruzó las piernas. —En que no coinciden. —Muy instructivo.”
― Frank Schätzing, El quinto día

“The message left Kiel at a speed of 300,000 kilometres per second. The sequence of words keyed into Erwin Suess’s laptop at the Geomar Centre entered the net in digital form. Converted by laser diodes into optical pulses, the information raced along with a wavelength of 1.5 thousandths of a millimetre, shooting down a transparent fibreoptic cable with millions of phone conversations and packets of data. The fibres bundled the stream of light until it was no thicker than two hairs, while total internal reflection stopped it escaping. Whizzing towards the coast, the waves surged along the overland cable, speeding through amplifiers every fifty kilometres until the fibres vanished into the sea, protected by copper casing and thick rubber tubing, and strengthened by powerful wires. The underwater cable was as thick as a muscular forearm. It stretched out across the shelf, buried in the seabed to protect it from anchors and fishing-boats. TAT 14, as it was officially known, was a transatlantic cable linking Europe to the States. Its capacity was higher than that of almost any other cable in the world. There were dozens of such cables in the North Atlantic alone. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of optical fibre extended across the planet, making up the backbone of the information age. Three-quarters of their capacity was devoted to the World Wide Web. Project Oxygen linked 175 countries in a kind of global super Internet. Another system bundled eight optical fibres to give a transmission capacity of 3.2 terabits per second, the equivalent of 48 million simultaneous phone conversations. The delicate glass fibres on the ocean bed had long since supplanted satellite technology.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“There’s plenty of life down there. The trouble is, it sees us coming and steps aside.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“Juan Narciso Ucañan went to his fate that Wednesday, and no one even noticed.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“Ruefully she thought of the cigarette she’d lit only seconds before the explosion. It was still smouldering in the CIC. What a waste. She’d have given anything for a cigarette now. Just one before she died. Instinct told her that no one on the ship was likely to survive. But no, she thought suddenly. Of course. They weren’t reliant on lifeboats. They had helicopters. Relief flooded through her. Shankar had reached the top of the companionway. Hands stretched down to haul him out. As Crowe followed, it struck her that what they were experiencing might be the kind of contact humans knew best - aggressive, ruthless and murderous. Soldiers pulled her into the island. Well, Ms Alien, she thought, what do you think now about finding intelligent life in space? ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?’ she asked a soldier. He stared at her. ‘You’ve got to be kidding, lady. Just get the hell out of here.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel

“He saw a dark shadow flit through the water above him. Then another. The whales paid him no attention. That’s right, thought Greywolf, I’m your friend. You won’t hurt me. He knew, of course, that the real explanation was more prosaic. They hadn’t noticed him. Orcas like those had no friends. They weren’t even orcas any more. They had been subjugated by a species that was as ruthless as mankind. But some day it would be OK again. The time would come. And the Grey Wolf would become an orca. He breathed out.”
― Frank Schätzing, The Swarm: A Novel