(urth) Dome, Dome on the Range

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

--- On Wed, 1/12/11, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:

> From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
> Subject: (urth) Dome, Dome on the Range
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Wednesday, January 12, 2011, 10:08 AM
> 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.

Point taken. Water is certainly needed, but irrigation suggests tree farms, not forests.

> 
> > 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.

Agreed.
 
> >>> 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.

Fair enough: the Forests of Lune must be treated as partly mythical. However, the very word "garden," especially in the setting of a desert river, does indeed mean all those things, by definition. Again, forests are wild; there must be something wild in the legend of the forests of Lune.

> >>> ---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.

I only mean that the threshold is not 51%, like a presidential mandate, but much higher.

> >> 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.

You may be right, but you may be wrong. Severian looks at Lune quite a bit, but never catches a flash or mentions hearing about anyone who did. That's fairly absolute, so I have to be skeptical.

One could also observe that Urthians don't mention seeing rocket flares either. Is this because such technology is obsolete, except perhaps for pushing certain asteroids long distances, or because even large ships simply would not be visible? I don't know.
 
> > 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.

I would not propose that!

> >>> ---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?

Nothing. They can dome all they want.
 
> >>> 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 advanced 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.

They aren't really in the same league, are they? Sparkles and flashes are at least potentially  observable; mass and gravity are not. 

The Moon can't hold air because it's too small and cold. If it's not our Moon, it doesn't need to be so small and cold. The solution is implicit in the problem. 

Also, there is artificial gravity of the magical, not physical, kind. We know this technology exists and we know Lune has power. Why not have a 1-gee Moon? I suppose the best argument against this is negative: the Whorl, much smaller, has physically created artificial gravity.