Manifold. Time (Stephen Baxter)

This is a big, sweeping SF novel with lots of interesting ideas, but it didn't click with me. A failed astronaut turned wealthy businessman creates an aerospace company ostensibly to use old rocket motors to destroy dangerous waste, but really he plans to create his own rogue space company to take mankind out to the asteroids and ultimately to the stars. He is under the influence of a doomsday cult that claims that the human race is destined to die out in  200 years, and believes this can only be averted through space travel. They work together to search for signals sent back in time from future generations, and find some that seem to suggest they should start by visiting a particular asteroid first. The ship that visits this asteroid is piloted by a cognitively enhanced squid, who has much more flexible navigation and control abilities than a computer or robot. It turns out the asteroid has a portal that is a gateway to the future (or sometimes to other places - it's not consistent). All of this seems to me to be a patchwork of implausible concepts that just doesn't work. At the very beginning I shook my head at the statistical argument put forward to prove that the human race is doomed, which goes like this: If humanity continues to expand in the future as it has in the past, then all the people alive today are a vanishingly small percentage of all the humans who will ever exist. Therefore it is hugely unlikely that we are here, now, unless we are a substantial fraction of all humanity, in which case the race can't keep going much longer. Sorry, but this argument doesn't work! In addition to the unconvincing science and technology in the story, the people also failed to convince me (I never felt they were more than props acting out the author's plot visions). I know that the story grabs other people who are taken with the big ideas here, but it just passed me by.