(urth) Prior Race On Blue And Green

Pedro Pereira domus_artemis at hotmail.com
Mon Dec 17 01:36:50 PST 2007


> Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 23:44:28 -0500> To: urth at lists.urth.net> From: gwern0 at gmail.com> Subject: Re: (urth) Prior Race On Blue And Green> > On 2007.12.16 22:01:24 -0600, Adam Thornton <adam at io.com> scribbled 4.3K characters:> > On Dec 16, 2007, at 9:50 PM, Michael Dale wrote:> >> > Who is the Undine that exist on Blue? It is not Scylla if she is also> > on Urth I think. (so long that SilkHorn cannot time travel)> >> > I heard someone say that the undines put a blackhole in the sun. I> > don't think so since they want to survive on the Urth also.> >> > I don't know that I like this idea, but it's a new one to me:> > What if the Whorl never actually GOES anywhere?> > I've wondered before what the acceleration means in terms of whether its> > bodies of water stay put, and whether that gives a maximum and minimum> > time for its trip.> > But what happens if the Whorl just kinda wanders around the Solar System> > for a few centuries, or millennia, or aeons, and Silk's trip to meet> > Severian is "mere" time travel, not spatial travel? What if Blue and> > Green *are* Earth and Venus in the future after the arrival of the New> > Sun?> > I now need to think and read and see whether that's at all internally> > consistent.> > Another sort-of-snarky point: what if TBot*S isn't _meant_ to be hard SF?> > Maybe we're just supposed to read it as _The Dying Earth_ written by> > someone who can really, really write (look, I like Jack Vance too, but> > he's no Gene Wolfe), and who has read his Borges.> > Adam> > That *might* work. It's been used in hard sci-fi before; I think particularly of Baxter's Xeelee Sequence and _Ring_.> > You would expect the Whorl to accelerate to near-C for a few decades. The gravity both on Blue and Green as well as the Whorl seem to be as close to normal as makes no difference, so our acceleration/deceleration could be at most 1.0Gs of accel. It would take a while to reach .9c, but if we grant 150/1500 years for the initial acceleration, that's more than enough to get a very very high velocity, and spend a couple decades hanging around at ridiculous time dilations. I mean, I don't know the math, but I suspect fractions of millions of years are possible here. Baxter has the Great Northern spend 1000 time-dilated years, ending up 5 million years after launch; 300 years ought to get us at least 1 million years into the future.> > That scenario gives us some stuff to look for: acceleration and then deceleration would probably be symmetrical, so we could expect to see some signal or occurrence some decades before 'arrival' when the Whorl stopped accelerating or coasting and began the deceleration from relativistic speeds.> > We could also expect signs of even more advanced age in the universe, but given that Sol would've been rejuvenated at this point by Severian, I'm hard-pressed to say what those signs would be.> > And further, why would Typhon send a colony off into the far future to a world he already solidly ruled? In _Ring_ it was because the vessel was dragging around one end of a wormhole, while the other end remained in the past; a wormhole allowing timetravel between megayears has obvious utility, but what good does planting a colony in the far future do? Preventing the extinction of humanity is an obvious goal, but that seems awfully altruistic for Typhon.
 
Not preventing the extinction of humanity; he would prevent the extinction of HIS MEMORY. He was quite megalomaniac and he could simply want for his memory (and his Pas version) to keep beying worshiped in the future. For that, he would have to ensure the existance of humanity. No altruism here.
 
 
 
 
Pedro
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