QUANTUMECHOES.

They are enormous and they are patient and they are, in the end, quite simple: you put a great many ears in a very quiet place, you point them at the sky, and you wait. The difficulty is never the sky. The difficulty is the quiet. To hear something faint from a hundred and thirty light-years away you must first persuade an entire region of your own planet to stop talking, and people, it turns out, would rather do almost anything than stop talking.

Read more from the preface +

So the job is not really astronomy. The job is negotiating with governments, landowners, treasuries, engineers, mining companies, committees and the weather, for twenty years, over an instrument that will not produce a result until most of the people arguing about it have retired. You learn a great deal about human beings that way. You learn that almost nobody in the room is a villain, and that this is not the comfort it sounds like.

That is the thing I could not get out of my head, and it is why this book exists.

“What do you do when everybody meant well?”

Selected passages from the author’s preface to Quantum Echoes: The Proxima Paradox.