How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Line)
Quote #4
It formed with the rest of the solar system, around five billion years ago. (3.1.1)
Five billions years? Just think about how long that is. Seriously. Puts how lucky we are in perspective—given that in the entire solar system, in five billion years time, only Earth hit the sweet spot for life. On the other hand, it's not like we'd know if Earth hadn't gotten it right.
Quote #5
Beauty could make you shiver! It was a shock to feel such a physical response to beauty, a thrill like some kind of sex. And this beauty was so strange, so alien. Nadia had never seen it properly before, or never really felt it, she realized that now; she had been enjoying her life as if it were a Siberia made right, so that really she had been living in a huge analogy […]. (3.5.44)
We often try to explain new experiences to ourselves by using our own experiences as a reference. But sometimes, the old experiences just don't cut it.
Quote #6
Ann shrugged. "It's a question of how warm we make it. And of how much total water there is on the planet, and how much of the water in the regolith will surface when we heat the atmosphere. We won't know any of those things until they happen." (3.5.119)
In other words: we can know a lot of stuff about a place before we get there, but sometimes we just need go and dig around in the dirt.