(urth) The green man is a fake

[James Wynn]

I said:
 >> Yes, but one must allow the possibility that artifically manufactured
 > >algae could leverage the sunlight to get more oomph.

Pedro Pereira wrote:
 > As it has already been said "The amount of sunlight hitting the area 
of human skin is not enough energty to allow
 > homeothermy and movement". What that means is that it is physically 
impossible to harvest enough energy from the sun
 > for a body with such a mass/surface area ratio to support him to such 
an extent. Artificial algae won't change that.
 > Alo, I seem to remember that the Green Man is not supposed to eat, 
etc. It's almost as if Wolfe forgot that photosynthesis
 > is a source of energy but photosynthetic organisms still need "food" 
for structural building (growth) in the form of
 > other nutrients.

1) There's plenty of room in Severian's encounter with the Green Man for 
undiscussed feeding processes that included taking organic that did not 
require killing.

2) Notice I used the word "leverage". What I'm suggesting is that it is 
theoretically possible that the Green Men's algae use the sunlight to 
tap power unavailable to us at this time (just as could be said of 
nuclear power plants in 1880). If serious people can imagine an economy 
running on solar power, Wolfe is not too far out there. This reminds me 
of ancient philosophers saying that it is impossible that the Earth 
rotates because the resulting wind would blow us all off the planet. It 
also reminds me of Wolfe's answer to those who said the Godling's 
anatomy was impossible. He responded [paraphrasing] "That's only true 
if  the godling were constructed along the same lines as a human [...] I 
weary of people making claims about the limits of biological potential."

u+16b9



>
>
> > Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2011 14:38:24 -0600
> > From: crushtv at gmail.com
> > To: urth at lists.urth.net
> > Subject: Re: (urth) The green man is a fake
> >
> >
> > >>> Lee Berman-
> > >>> The amount of sunlight hitting the area of human skin is not enough
> > >>> energty to allow
> > >>> homeothermy and movement.
> > >
> > > Jeff Wilson-
> > > Preaching to the choir, though I hadn't posted about this since you
> > > were yclept bsharp.
> >
> > Yes, but one must allow the possibility that artifically manufactured
> > algae could leverage the sunlight to get more oomph. Even today, people
> > boost the idea of solar energy replacing carbon fuels in all our
> > vehicles and homes. They expect this even though after 3.5 billion 
> years
> > of evolution no creature that uses a significant amount of energy (like
> > say a really lazy alligator) relies on solar energy even primarily. 
> They
> > all rely on carbon fuels and --at best-- gain supplementary energy from
> > the sun. Yet, hope in technological breakthroughs springs eternal. And,
> > this is, after all a sci-fi story.
> >
> > u+16b9
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