Seveneves eBook Sampler – pages 3–108

“Those of us who are going to live,” Dinah said, “have to start living by our own lights.”

This had prompted Dinah to joke that perhaps all meetings should take place in hermetically sealed rooms, so that they could only go on for so long.

The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.

Frozen sperm, eggs, and embryos would be sent up there too, so that even those who were left behind to die on the Earth’s surface could enjoy some hope that their offspring would one day grow to maturity in orbiting space colonies, and commune with their departed ancestors through digitally preserved letters, photographs, and videos. To Doob, this part of the talk seemed tacked on, something put in there just to hold out a glimmer of hope. But he knew that it was, in a way, the most important thing that any of the speakers would say today. The rest of the message had been stunningly grim, too shocking for most people to take in.

Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.
There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time.

Everyone who worked on Izzy had to have at least working knowledge of Russian.