Stephen Baxter: Human

“On the longest of timescales, over millions of years, the workings of chance defied human intuition. Humans were equipped with a subjective consciousness of risk and improbability suitable for creatures with a lifespan of less than a century or so. Event that came much less frequently than that—such as asteroid impacts—were place, in human minds, in the category not of rare, but of never. But the impacts happened even so, and to a creature with a lifespan of, say, ten million years, would not have seemed so improbable at all.
Given enough time even such unlikely events as ocean crossings from Africa to South America would inevitably occur, over and again, and would shape the destiny of life.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 6 “The Crossing” section IV (p. 185)

Life , Chance , Time

“It (i. e., agriculture) was the most profound revolution in hominid living since Homo erectus had left the forest and committed themselves to the savannah. Compared to this phase shift, the advances of the future—even genetic engineering—were details. There would never be so significant a change again, not until humans themselves disappeared from the planet.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 14 “The Swarming People” section II (p. 456)

Change , Future

“His overriding lesson for thinkers like Hutton was that scientists, even those occupied by an apparently ‘concrete’ discipline like geology, need to be careful not just about what they claim to know but also about how they claim to know it. Human reason is a fragile thing and prone to be overthrown by suggestibility.”

Stephen Baxter

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 13, “Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion” (p. 124)

“Nothing mankind had done in its short and bloody history had made the slightest bit of difference to this patient geographical realignment.
Meanwhile the Earth, left to its own devices, had deployed a variety of healing mechanisms, physical, chemical, biological, and geological, to recover from the devastating interventions of its human inhabitants. Air pollutants had been broken up by sunlight and dispersed. Bog ore had absorbed much metallic waste. Vegetation had recolonized abandoned landscapes, roots breaking up concrete and asphalt, overgrowing ditches and canals. Erosion by wind and water had caused the final collapse of the last structures, washing it all into sand.
Meanwhile the relentless processes of variation and selection had worked to fill an empty world.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 18 “The Kingdom of the Rats” section II (p. 579)

World , History , Water

“As the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section II (p. 525)

Nature , Animals

“The emergent humans were still animals, still bound by natural law. No innovation in the way they lived would have taken root if it had not given them an adaptive advantage in the endless struggle to survive. An ability to believe in things that weren’t true was a powerful tool.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section IV (p. 367)

Law , Way , Nature , Animals

“Darwin had found a way in which a species could be shaped to fit its environment—not by divine intervention, not by mind, but through the steady, relentless working of natural law. Just like the Huttonian prescription for the Earth, it was a Newtonian scheme for life. For better or worse, Darwin transformed our view of our place in the universe. Humans too are not the outcome of a divine design, but simply products of the relentless workings of natural laws, just like rivers and mountains, beetles and whales.”

Stephen Baxter

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 20, “It altered the tone of one’s mind” (p. 208)

Life , Law , Way , Mountain

“Humans and their petty doings come and go, but the geology endures.”

Stephen Baxter

Epilogue (p. 223)
Ages in Chaos (2003)

“Relentless Pleistocene selection was shaping everything that would make up humanity. Even love was a by-product of evolution. Love, and the pain of loss.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 10 “The Crowded Land” section II (p. 308)

Love , Pain , Loss

“Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales—which said that Jahna’s people were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human—taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.
But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such non-people as the Old Man’s kind.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 13 “Last Contact” section III (p. 432)

People , Way , Passion

“It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level...A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good.”

Stephen Baxter book Timelike Infinity

Source: Timelike Infinity (1992), Chapter 12 (p. 266)

Way , Intelligence

“Self-doubt is part of being human...but the main thing is to get on with the business of survival.”

Stephen Baxter book Raft

Source: Raft (1991), Chapter 16 (p. 158)

Business , Self-confidence , Parting

“Maybe it’s time we humans abandoned our species-specific chauvinism—our petty outrage that the Universe has unfolded in a way that doesn’t suit us.”

Stephen Baxter book Ring

Source: Ring (1994), Chapter 27 (p. 825)

Universe , Way , Time