# Blue Mars >[!info]- metadata >*`= this.tags`* >- Online Rating - `=this.onlineRating` | My Rating- `=this.personalRating` >- Status - `=this.status` >- Progress - `=this.currentPage` of `=this.pages`  ## Summary `=this.description` ## My Thoughts >[!quote]+ My Review >`= this.review` ### Notes - ### Highlights - Strange the birth of myths, strange the old names that they lived among and ignored, while they continued to tell the old stories over and over again with their lives. - Had they really worked all their lives to overthrow Terran domination of Mars, only in order to put in place their own local version of the same thing? Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly? - His visitors were people for whom Mars was forever an idea, a nascent state, a political situation. They lived in the tents and they might as well have been in a city anywhere, and their devotion, while real, was given to some cause or idea, some Mars of the mind. - It didn't have what people wanted, some kind of compression of the truth, to creat a strong trace in the memory, perhaps. Symbolic thinking; people needed things thrown together. - "Concentrate on the moment," Sax suggested. "Each moment is its own reality. It has its particular thisness. You can't predict, but you can explain. Or try. If you are observant, and lucky, you can say, this is why this is happening! It's very interesting!" - ["] Life on Mars. An odd business. Life anywhere, really. Not at all obvious why it should appear. This was something Sax had been thinking about recently. Why was there increasing order in any part of the cosmos, when one might expect nothing but entropy everywhere? This puzzled him greatly. He had been intrigued when Spencer had offered an offhand explanation over beer one night on the Odessa corniche—in an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible. This difference was what humans perceived as order. ^dbe139 - ["] "Do you think this theory will mean the end of physics?" he asked. "Oh no. Although we might work out the fundamentals. You know, the basic laws. That might be possible, sure. But then every level of emergence above that creates its own problems [...] It's like chess—we might learn all the rules, but still not be able to play very well because of emergent properties. Like, you know, pieces are stronger if they're out in the center of the board. That's not in the rules, it's a result of all the rules put together." ^9f14ec - “How John would have liked this," Sax said, haltingly. So hard to speak of these things. "I wonder if he could have made Ann see it. How I miss him. How I want her to see it. Not to see it the way I do. Just to see it as if it were something-good. See how beautiful it is—in its own way. In itself, the way it all organizes itself. We say we manage it, but we don't. It's too complex. We just brought it here. After that it took off on its own. Now we try to push it this way or that, but the total biosphere... It's self-organizing. There's nothing unnatural about it." - Page 446 - Nirgal got in a rhythm and kept it all day. *Lung-gom-pa*. The religion of running, running as meditation or prayer. Zazen, ka zen. Part of the areophany, as Martian gravity was integral to it; what the human body could achieve in two fifths the pull it had evolved for was a euphoria of effort. One ran as a pilgrim, half worshiper half god. - Page 453 - [[kairos]] - Sometimes there were organized runs, races: Thread the Labyrinth, Chaos Crawl, the Transmarineris, the Round-the-Worlder. And in between those, the daily discipline. Purposeless activity; art for art's sake. For Nirgal it was worship, or meditation, or oblivion. His mind wandered, or focused on his body, or on the trail; or went blank. At this moment he was running to music, Bach then Bruckner then Bonnie Tyndall, an Elysian neoclassicist whose music poured along like the day itself, tall chords shifting in steady internal modulation, somewhat like Bach or Bruckner in fact but slower and steadier, more inexorable and grand. Fine music to run by, even though for hours at a time he didn't consciously hear it. He only ran. - 453 - This was the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe: pure joy, the sense of self gone, the mind become no more than a mirror of the wind. -505 - The guardian group conceived of Miranda as wilderness, to be walked through but never lived on, never changed. A climber's world, or even better, a flier's world. Looked at and nothing more. A natural work of art. - 536 - Now you want to protect this place as wilderness, and I can see why. But I'm a Martian, and so I understand. A lot of you are Martian, or your parents were. You start from that ethical position, and in the end wilderness is an ethical position. - 540