{"product_id":"manifold-time-isbn-9780345430762","title":"Manifold: Time","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Reading \u003ci\u003eManifold: Time \u003c\/i\u003eis like sending your mind to the gym for a brisk workout. If you don’t feel both exhausted and exhilirated when you’re done, you haven’t been working hard enough.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. As the world’s governments turn inward, one man dares to envision a bolder, brighter future. That man, Reid Malenfant, has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the exploration and colonization of space. Now Malenfant gambles the very existence of time on a single desperate throw of the dice. Battling national sabotage and international outcry, as apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, he builds a spacecraft and launches it into deep space. The odds are a trillion to one against him. Or are they?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“A staggering novel! If you ever thought you understood time, you\u003cb\u003e’ll be quickly disillusioned when you read \u003ci\u003eManifold: Time.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e”—Sir Arthur C. Clarke\u003c\/b\u003e“Remarkable . . . intriguing . . . fast-paced.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Reading \u003ci\u003eManifold: Time\u003c\/i\u003e is like sending your mind to the gym for a brisk workout. If you don’t feel both exhausted and exhilarated when you’re done, you haven't been working hard enough.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A staggering novel! If you ever thought you understood time, you’ll be quickly disillusioned when you read \u003ci\u003eManifold: Time\u003c\/i\u003e.”\u003cb\u003e—Sir Arthur C. Clarke\u003c\/b\u003eStephen Baxter is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge (mathematics) and Southampton Universities (doctorate in aeroengineering research). He has worked with Rolls Royce Ltd., and at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, U.K. In his research, Baxter visited NASA launch centers, viewed a shuttle launch, and interviewed both a NASA mission controller and an astronaut. He also conducted extensive research into the history of NASA, scientific studies of Mars, astronauts, and other key players. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs an acclaimed author, Stephen Baxter is the winner of both The British Science Fiction Award and the Locus Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award and a Hugo Award. His novel Voyage won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel of the Year; he also won the John W. Campbell Award and the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel The Time Ships.Reid Malenfant   You know me. And you know I'm a space cadet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou know I've campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In fact, in the past I've tried to get you to pay for such things. I've bored you with that often enough already, right?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo tonight I want to look a little farther out. Tonight I want to tell you why I care so much about this issue that I devoted my life to it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe world isn't big enough any more. You don't need me to stand here and tell you that. We could all choke to death, be extinct in a hundred years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr we could be on our way to populating the Galaxy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYes, the Galaxy. Want me to tell you how?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTurns out it's all a question of economics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet's say we set out to the stars. We might use ion rockets, solar sails, gravity assists. It doesn't matter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe'll probably start as we have in the Solar System, with automated probes. Humans may follow. One percent of the helium-3 fusion fuel available from the planet Uranus, for example, would be enough to send a giant interstellar ark, each ark containing a billion people, to every star in the Galaxy. But it may be cheaper for the probes to manufacture humans in situ, using cell synthesis and artificial womb technology.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first wave will be slow, no faster than we can afford. It doesn't matter. Not in the long term.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the probe reaches a new system, it phones home, and starts to build.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere is the heart of the strategy. A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore anticipate massive exploitation of the system's resources, without restraint, by the probe. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI thought you'd enjoy that line. There's nothing an entre- preneur likes more than the sound of the word free.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMore probes will be built and launched from each of the first wave of target stars. The probes will reach new targets; and again, more probes will be spawned, and fired onward. The volume covered by the probes will grow rapidly, like the expansion of gas into a vacuum.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur ships will spread along the spiral arm, along lanes rich with stars, farming the Galaxy for humankind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnce started, the process will be self-directing, self-financing. It would take, the double-domes think, ten to a hundred million years for the colonization of the Galaxy to be completed in this manner. But we must invest merely in the cost of the initial generation of probes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThus the cost of colonizing the Galaxy will be less, in real terms, than that of our Apollo program of fifty years ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis vision isn't mine alone. It isn't original. The rocket pioneer Robert Goddard wrote an essay in 1918--ninety-two years ago--called The Ultimate Migration, in which he imagined space arks built from asteroid materials carrying our far-future descendants away from the death of the sun. The engineering detail has changed; the essence of the vision hasn't.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe can do this. If we succeed, we will live forever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe alternative is extinction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd, people, when we're gone, we're gone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs far as we can see we're alone, in an indifferent universe. We see no sign of intelligence anywhere away from Earth. We may  be the first. Perhaps we're the last. It took so long for the Solar System to evolve intelligence it seems unlikely there will be others, ever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf we fail, then the failure is for all time. If we die, mind and consciousness and soul die with us: hope and dreams and love, everything that makes us human. There will be nobody even to mourn us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo be the first is an awesome responsibility. It's a responsibility we must grasp.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI am offering you a practical route to an infinite future for humankind, a future of unlimited potential. Someday, you know it, I'll come back to you again for money: seedcorn money, that's all, so we can take a first step--self-financing even in the medium term--beyond the bounds of Earth. But I want you to see why I'll be doing that. Why I must.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe can do this. We will do this. We're on our own. It's up to us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is just the beginning. Join me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThank you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMichael\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is what I have learned, Malenfant. This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEverywhere they found life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNowhere did they find mind--save what they brought with them or created--no other against which human advancement could be tested.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is impossible to understand what minds of that age--the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind--were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was despair and loneliness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe great rivers of mind guttered and dried.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBurning the last of the universe's resources, the final downstreamers--dogged, all but insane--reached to the deepest past. And--oh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWatch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It's starting--","brand":"Del Rey","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301975019749,"sku":"NP9780345430762","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345430762.jpg?v=1767732222","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/manifold-time-isbn-9780345430762","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}