How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Line)
Quote #1
And so we came here. [Mars] has been a power; now it became a place. (1.1.6)
Upon setting foot on the planet, Mars suddenly becomes something in the realm of imagination and the realm of reality. Sometimes you just need touch the thing.
Quote #2
"Look, Mars is its own place. You can play your climate-shifting games back on Earth if you want, they need the help. Or try it on Venus. But you can't just wipe out a three-billion-year-old planetary surface." (2.2.46)
Mars sure must have a power on people. Maybe Ann's writing off Earth because we've tampered with it so much, but it doesn't make any logical sense to go mess with Venus. So Ann's vision of Mars must come from a not-so-logical place.
Quote #3
The short rugged curved mountain ranges were darker than the surrounding countryside, a rust color broken by black shadows. But both the light and dark colors were just a shade away from the omnipresent rusty-orangish-red, which was the color of every peak, crater, canyon, dune, and even the curved slice of the dust-filled atmosphere, visible high above the bright curve of the planet. Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it. (2.4.110)
Wow. Speaking of that power Mars has on the imagination… They're only words, but you feel like you've kind of been to the place, huh?
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.
Quote #7
"Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars." (3.6.121)
Sax argues that without humans to give Mars meaning, Mars would have no meaning. It's kind of like have a painting but no one to look at it. What's the value in the painting then?
Quote #8
"Yeah, yeah. But who knows what our kids will think is beautiful? It's sure to be based on what they know, and this place will be the only place they know. So we terraform the planet; but the planet areoforms us." (5.2.141)
As new environments change us, we aren't just altered on the genetic level. Our concepts of art and beauty shift, too.
Quote #9
And below them the round orange floor of Mars looked just as blank as it had on their first approach so long ago, unchanged despite all their meddling. One only had to get far enough away. (6.5.2)
It's like the novel is saying that we shouldn't worry too much about destroying a planet. After all, we're not even ants compared to the big, old thing. On the other hand, just because we don't destroy a planet doesn't mean it'll stay habitable for us either.