Peter Cawdron > Quotes

“Knowledge is more dangerous than any gun, more dangerous than a sword or knife. Even in Eden, knowledge was forbidden.” “But why?” “Knowledge shapes decisions. Limit knowledge and you limit the choices people can make. Knowledge has always been about power, for better or for worse, for good or for evil.”
― Peter Cawdron, Monsters

“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

“Don’t go looking for miracles. You are the miracle. Every day, your body creates roughly three hundred billion new blood cells. That’s more than all the stars in the galaxy. Imagine that.”
― Peter Cawdron, 3zekiel

“Email, Facebook, Twitter—all those false prophets of contrived importance—they can wait. Any urgency they have is artificial. Besides, I’ve had my fill of cat videos this week.”
― Peter Cawdron, Starship Mine

“Think about something beautiful. Like a sunset. We look at a planet like Saturn and see beauty. For hundreds of millions of years those magnificent rings have been there, stretching out around a gas giant that’s seven hundred and fifty times larger than Earth, but it’s only now they’re beautiful, only now when we look at them through a telescope or through the eyes of a robotic probe. Don’t you see, without us, they’re meaningless. We make them beautiful.”
― Peter Cawdron, 3zekiel

“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

“Cathy says, “I’ve always hated that phrase—the opposite sex. I mean, how exactly do we oppose each other? How exactly are we opposites? I think we’re complementary.”
― Peter Cawdron, Anomaly

“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

“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

“French/American novelist Angela Anaïs Nin once said, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are!”
― Peter Cawdron, The Tempest

“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

“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

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

“My problem is, I’m a slow reader. The more I enjoy a book, the slower I read, savoring each moment, so I don’t get through as many books as I’d like.”
― Peter Cawdron, Monsters

“If anything, technology allows us to be dumb without consequence.”
― Peter Cawdron, Xenophobia

“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

“Books are the mind of the past,” she says. “And yet they’re stepping stones to the future.”
― Peter Cawdron, Apothecary

“It’s not pride that stops men from asking for help. It’s that they don’t want to shatter the illusion that everything’s the same as it has always been. Blind zeal, that’s what it was, not pride.”
― Peter Cawdron, My Sweet Satan

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“George Orwell warned against systems that could monitor every aspect of life. He thought humanity would rally and fight against such intrusion, but he was wrong. Humans have welcomed AI because it’s helpful, regardless of any perceived violation of rights. Privacy is as much a relic of the past as the pyramids.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“Tragedy porn hurts.”
― Peter Cawdron, The Simulacrum

“For all the talk of vampires, the real issue is life, not blood. Blood is the means, not the end.”
― Peter Cawdron, Vampire

“Reason is an extension rather than a replacement for knowledge. Ignorance is an impediment.”
― Peter Cawdron, Cold Eyes

“Those in power fear nothing but change,”
― Peter Cawdron, Apothecary

“Funny, though, how someone so social in a virtual sense can be so closed off physically.”
― Peter Cawdron, Hello World