How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Line)
Quote #4
"Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces." (3.5.166)
Identity shapes environment. Just think of this like someone's home: it might be the same type of house as your home, but the person living there always puts their unique stamp on it. Now imagine that home is a planet, and you're right with Ann here.
Quote #5
All these adaptive abilities are coded and passed along in genes. If the genes mutate, the organisms change. If the genes are altered, the organisms change. (4.1.2)
Where do our genes end, and we begin? Is there even a distinction between the two? Big questions in this quote—best not to tackle on an empty stomach.
Quote #6
They still had a scientific mindset and worldview, they were practical, empirical, rational; one could hope that the selection process on Earth was still working against fanaticism, sending up people with a kind of traveling-Swiss sensibility practical but open to new possibilities, able to form new loyalties and beliefs. Or so he hoped. He knew by now it was a bit naïve. You only had to look at the first hundred to realize scientists could become as fanatical as anybody else, maybe more so […]. (5.4.2)
We give our identities fancy labels such as scientist or religious, reader or Swiss. But do these labels speak to our identity? Or when we whittle all these labels away, are we still as fanatical as everyone else?