(urth) The green man is a fake

[Jerry Friedman]

>From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>
...

>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.
 
He says they get no nourishment except from the algae.

>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).

Like Antonio, you're leaving us to fill in your interesting suggestion.  Green 
people
are yesodotrophs?

Why would Wolfe hide something so cool from us?  And if any energy
source could be tapped in proportion to solar power, algae seem like an odd
mechanism for it.  Sympathetic magic?

> If serious people can     imagine an economy running on solar 
>power, Wolfe is not too far out     there.

Some arcane source of energy for the green man's algae strikes me as
way, way more hard-science-fictionally believable than the alzabo and its
analept.  Or even the notule, which prefers the heat of living creatures.

On solar power, Wikipedia notes (with sources if anyone wants to check) that
more solar energy hits the Earth every hour than humanity used in the whole
year 2002.  "All" that's necessary is technological breakthroughs, as Jeff
Wilson implied.  I see this as in a quite different category from that unknown
source of energy that algae can tap in proportion to the solar energy they
get.

> 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."

But at least that second comparison is unfair.  Tapping some unknown source
of energy is hardly biology in the way that giant fossil birds and pterodactyls 
are.

Jerry Friedman