(urth) How Far in the Future is Urth?
Jeff Wilson
jwilson at io.com
Mon Dec 1 12:19:29 PST 2008
John Smith wrote:
> People seem to have significant differences of opinion as to how far in the future Severian's Urth is. Is it a few thousand years in the future or a few hundred million?
>
> I lean toward one million years for these reasons:
>
> 1. The moon has been irrigated and now supports vast forests. Changing a barren rock into a place that supports life would take a long time.
The forested moon has to be superscience or an illusion or a deliberate
fake, there being no other way to keep air on such a small body. none of
the three are time-critical.
> 2. Mining is done by digging up forgotten buried cities.
Today we are digging up artifacts from colonial era residences
contemporary with the 17th century British trade in Roman artifacts left
there in the time of Caligula, who helped himself to Alexander's
breatplate, who helped himself to the gold of Egypt, which was
perpetually being buried with pharoahs and then grave-robbed back into
circulation for thousands of years before that.
> 3. At some point in Claw, Severian climbs down a cliff, passing by layers of sediments that must have taken ages to lay down.
landfills typically take a few decades to fill
> 4. Enough time has passed for star-faring civilizations to have arisen and fallen.
Arguably it never fell, but may have moved around as different planets
began and ceased to offer an incentive to trade - since Jonas was
immediately familiar with Inire's Yesodi technology, we have no way to
know if his many "normal" space journeys were sequential or not.
--
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >
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