(urth) Dome, Dome on the Range

[Jeff Wilson]

On 1/12/2011 6:52 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
>
> On 1/12/2011 12:17 AM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
>> 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?
> The argument was not that domes are small but that "The word "forest" is
> not even suggestive of domes. "

"forest" is not suggestive of irrigation either, but "forest on the 
moon" is.

> Anyway, height is not the
> issue---breadth is the issue. At some point, it's no longer a dome but
> an airtight greenhouse. Whatever you say, you are filling in Wolfe's
> blanks with conjecture, however sound.

That's fine, as long as it's a more likely conjecture than the open air 
massive-moon bull. I don't draw a particular line where large airtight 
greenhouses stop and domes begin because there really isn't a useful one.

>>> 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."
>> Long answer: The only way to connect forests to domes is to perform a
>>
>> 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.
> I didn't say domes didn't exist on Urth. But remember, you said there is
> no difference between forests and domed forests. Now it seems there are
> all kinds of differences. Which is it?

I don't think the difference question was ever posed with clearly stated 
antecedents. Regardless, I did not state affirmatively either way. I 
don't see that having domes over the forests prevents people of speaking 
of the forests while omitting the domes. Compare "the Gardens of 
Babylon" is used without digression into terracing, irrigation, 
channels, fertilizing, or even surety that they ever existed.

>>> ---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.
> No. It's not "greener than not." It's GREEN. From your Earth analogy,
> it's 70% green.

I don't understand. If it's 70% green, then the other 30% is implicitly 
not green, which inarguably makes it more green 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.
> Precisely. The whole thing about forests is that they admit anyone who
> enters them. Kind of hard to play Robin Hood on a world of airlocks.
>> 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.
> Which is why it doesn't matter.
>>> 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.)
>> ---The light of Lune is not flashing or sparkly but just green. Nor is
>>
>> 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.
> This is just dismissing facts. As I said, no one mentions that Lune is
> flashing or sparkly. Therefore, we are not meant to think that it is,
> nor are we meant to jump through hoops.to figure out why.

Remember, under the dome hypothesis, the moon is still 250,000 miles 
away. The sparkles may not be distinguishable from that distance. 
Consider how sparkly beach sand is (or isn't) despite rich in quartz 
facets up to a millimeter in size. A collection of meter-wide quartz 
panels 250,000 miles away will have approximately the same angular size 
specular highlights and the approximately the same chance of catching 
your eye with a reflection as an equal number of the largest quartz sand 
grains 250 miles away.

>
> The main strength of your theory is that domes are another SF cliche
> that we might be expected to just "know." The more explaining you do,
> the weaker the theory becomes.

Not just "know", it is mentioned in Volumes 1 and 4. We've still got a 
looong way to go before we get to the massive-moon level of backing and 
covering.

>>
>>> ---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.
> This is terraforming.

Yes, and? What stops people from pumping it into their domes instead of 
leaving it outside to boil off?

>>> 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.
> Right.
>>
>>> 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.
> No. A miniplanet could be small enough to lack a native atmosphere but
> large enough to sustain a created one with help. Since you are appealing
> to advance technology, why not go in this direction?

If I can't have sparkles without reference, you can't have triple or 
better mass without reference.

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