Seveneves

In movies, when a planet blows up, it turns into a fireball and ceases to exist. This is not what happened to the moon. The Agent (as people came to call the mysterious force that did it) released a very large amount of energy, to be sure, but not nearly enough to turn all the moon’s substance into fire.

He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.

In those days Izzy had been like a kite: all surface area, no mass. In technical terms, it had had a low ballistic coefficient: a way of saying that it was strongly affected by what little atmosphere there was. Once Amalthea had been attached, it was like a kite with a big rock strapped to it. It had a high ballistic coefficient. The rock’s momentum bulled through the evanescent atmosphere and led to much slower orbital decay

The idea Sean was playing with here was so monstrous in a way that it was almost inconceivable: that everything they were doing up here was a lullaby for the seven billion down below. That it could not actually work. That they were just putting on a show of getting ready. That the people of the Cloud Ark would live only a few weeks longer than the ones left behind.

the “side door,” the maneuvering

If you’ve drunk the Singularity Kool-Aid,

school she had developed into a gifted soccer player and parlayed this talent into an athletic scholarship to Penn. During her sophomore year she had blown out her right ACL, terminating her serious athletic career, and turned her attention in a more serious way to the study of geology. That, plus a three-year relationship with a boy who liked to build robots, combined with her background in the mining industry, had made her into a perfect candidate for the job she had now

Rufus, a die-hard ham radio enthusiast who still communicated in Morse code with a dwindling circle of old friends all over the world, had pointed out that radio transmission between the ground and Izzy was actually rather easy, given that it was line-of-sight (at least when Izzy happened to be passing overhead) and that the distance was nothing by ham radio standards. Since Dinah lived and worked in a robot workshop, surrounded by soldering gear and electronics workbenches, it had been a simple matter for her to assemble a small transceiver following specifications provided by her dad

She peeled a headphone away from one ear and aimed it at her. Ivy recognized a cappella music, medieval polyphony. “King’s College is holding up rather well,” she said. “Do you know the piece?”
“I’m certain I’ve heard it before, but I can’t place it,” Ivy said.
“Allegri’s ‘Miserere mei, Deus,’” Moira said.

“I am Tyuratam Lake,” Ty said. “And this is Einstein. The woman there is Kath Two; she is unlikely to join the conversation.”
“Tyuratam,” said the Psych in a husky voice, “a city in Central Asia, close to the Soviet space launch facility of Baikonur in Kazakhstan. Einstein, a theoretical physicist of the early twentieth century, before Zero.”