Forty Signs of Rain

Kim Stanley Robinson

Top 10 Best Quotes

“An excess of reason is itself a form of madness”

“Yeah, hey you know carbon sinks are so crucial, scrubbing CO2 out of the air may eventually turn out to be our only option, so maybe we should reverse those two clauses. Make carbon sinks come first and the climate-neutral power plants second in that paragraph.” “You think?” “Yes. Definitely. Carbon sinks could be the only way that our kids, and about a thousand years’ worth of kids actually, can save themselves from living in Swamp World. From living their whole lives on Venus.”

“The battle for control of science went on. Many administrations and Congresses hadn’t wanted technology or the environment assessed at all, as far as Anna could see. It might get in the way of business. They didn’t want to know. For Anna there could be no greater intellectual crime. It was incomprehensible to her: they didn’t want to know. And yet they did want to call the shots. To Anna this was clearly crazy. Even Joe’s logic was stronger. How could such people exist, what could they be thinking? On what basis did they build such an incoherent mix of desires, to want to stay ignorant and to be powerful as well? Were these two parts of the same insanity?”

“The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons—on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. If all this energy were captured by the Earth’s atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees Celsius in one day. Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time. A good portion of Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive feedback loop.”

“When in doubt, just do it. Try something and observe the results. Good-enough decision algorithm”

“These differing roles could have led to differing thought processes, such that it would be possible to characterize plausibly the existence of unlike approaches even to ostensibly non-gender-differentiated activities, such as science. So that there could be a male practice of science and a female practice of science, in other words, and these could be substantially different activities.”

“The morning Post included an article informing Charlie that a chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf had broken off, a chunk more than half the size of France.”

“Live for the future. A cosmic history read out of signs so subtle and mathematical that only the effort of a huge transtemporal group of powerful minds could ever have teased it out; but then those who came later could be given the whole story, with its unexplored edges there to take off into.”

“It wasn’t big news, but it was a big iceberg. Researchers joked about moving onto it and declaring it a new nation. It contained more fresh water than all the Great Lakes combined. It had come off near a Roosevelt Island,”

“It had come off near a Roosevelt Island,”

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Book Keywords:

human-story, history, progress, science