(urth) Green is Urth Redux

[Jeff Wilson]

On 1/11/2011 9:58 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
> On 1/11/2011 6:31 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> On 1/11/2011 4:13 PM, DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
>>> You mean you don't see a difference?
>>
>> I'll bite, how are they different?
>>
> Short answer: forests are not domes. The word "forest" is not even
> suggestive of domes.

Why can't a forest grow in a big enough dome?

> Long answer: The only way to connect forests to domes is to perform a
> series of backstory fill-ins of the sort that make up your argument. The
> textual evidence for this is is zero beyond "there are forests on Lune."

Negative; there is the example of the Botanic Gardens's several 
bioscapes. If the Botanic Gardens can have rain forest jungle enclosures 
large enough to appear to be entirely natural from the inside, it stands 
to reason that other places can have them. The Asciians also seem to 
make use of domes that transfigure the character of their interiors from 
the conditions that obtain outside.

Meanwhile "there are forests on Lune" means something *has* to have 
happened to transfigure the character of the moon's surface from the 
desolation of the astronaut picture to something that cab support 
forests. Environmental domes are well within Urthly technology while 
planet moving seems to require Yesodi intervention.

> ---Forests are wild, and the Forest of Lune is a metaphor for
> wildness/wilderness when Vodalus (of the Wood) is imagined to be hiding
> among them. Domes are not wild. Why would you dome over the entire disk
> of Lune and let it go wild? (Who would smoke all that pot, even with the
> Port there?)

You wouldn't, but you could dome over enough of Lune's near side to make 
it look greener than not. If Vodalus wanted to hide, being behind anyone 
of million trees in any one of a million domes on a completely different 
world seems to fit the bill just as well. If the domes and their 
bioscapes are well designed, they can be as wild as any other place that 
admits Vodalus and his entourage, like an old ziggurat or an Asciian 
commo-dome. Not that Sev or Rudeisnd have to know about the domes any 
more than they would know about the insufficient mass of the moon or 
anything else that would be involved in making a forested Lune.



> ---The light of Lune is not flashing or sparkly but just green. Nor is
> there any observable intercedent, such as glass, between the myriad
> leaves and Urth. (Granted, any ancient Moon domes would be clean on the
> outside and probably dirty green on the inside. But still they leave no
> sign.)

Do we know that for sure? There is no surface detail I can find given 
other than its color and brightness. The same material technology that 
removes any reflection from fuligin could remove most of the wasteful or 
hazardous reflections of sunlight from the domes' material.

> ---Domes don't mean anything without water and air, and all those domes
> and trees need lots of water and air. Some water could come from ice
> under the crust. Where would air come from? Basically, the dome theory
> is just an easier version of the same problems you'd face with a
> terraforming theory, except for the weak gravity being no longer a problem.

As I said before, oxygen can be cheaply extracted from oxides in the 
regolith. The existence of water on the moon is a post-BOTNS discovery, 
but there are any number of sources of water in the solar system: Isaac 
Asmiov's 1952 novella, "The Martian Way" discusses the economics of 
getting water to Mars via atomic spaceship, and if works for Mars it 
works even better for Lune.

> There are no other substantive references to Lune except that it has a
> busy port and that it is brighter when the New Sun comes. I checked.

Purn seems to recall visiting when it looked white, indicating the 
forestation is not necessary for it to be a port of call, so being a 
port says nothing one way of the other.

> I'm not saying your argument is invalid or that domes are less likely
> than somehow adding enough mass to the Moon to let it hold water and
> air. But we could just as well posit that in Severian's "parallel"
> universe the moon is bigger. Or we could posit that there is no
> explanation for it at all, because it doesn't need one.

If the moon were bigger in his cycle, the surface would be different in 
the astronaut pictures, and there would be a native atmosphere to make 
the flag wave.

You could say most of the same things about the Whorl; are there no 
forests there?

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >