(urth) This week in Google Alerts

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

I have no problem with hundreds of millions of years. On the other
hand, I suspect that orogeny can take place much faster than that
given the right stimuli; and a technocosmic culture might provide such
stimuli -- if we can affect the world's climate, as we apparently
have, then what might a gravity-wielding civilization do to its
geology?

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 9:18 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
> Of course. But what does that distinction impact, exactly?
>
> We know that old cultures were revived after the computer age, and with them
> our old languages. These could not have and in fact did not survive 20,000
> years.
>
> We know or suspect that the Commonwealth is loosely based on Argentina.
> "Millions of years" is not long enough for continental drift to reverse
> itself, for the Andes to erode, and for a new Andes to rise. That would take
> many hundreds of millions. Maybe that is in fact what we are to conclude,
> although to my knowledge no one has done so.
>
> The 20,000-year figure is from Wolfe. I always thought it was way too low.
> Still, I don't buy hundreds of millions either. Alternative theories are
> available.
>
> So, is Mantis just way wrong?
>
> On 11/2/2011 11:52 AM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>>
>> Once again.
>>
>> TBotNS is far enough in the future that mountains containing the ruins
>> of long-buried cities have risen. This is not on the order of 20 or 30
>> thousand years; it is millions.
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 7:29 AM, Gerry Quinn<gerry at bindweed.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> From: David Stockhoff
>>>>
>>>> I believe the 20,000-year figure is from Wolfe. Since no major changes
>>>> could have occurred from "now" to Severian's time anyway, the
>>>> significant changes are cultural, not geographic. Yet European languages
>>>> are still spoken on the Whorl; even if they had to be revived for
>>>> Typhon's purposes, they still survived that long.
>>>
>>> Even in Severian’s time scholars retain some understanding of English, as
>>> we
>>> know from Thea’s disquisition about the renaming of Verthandi and Skuld.
>>>
>>> The atmosphere of BotNS has always reminded me of Robert Silverberg’s
>>> Nightwings, which is, if I recall correctly, set around the year 30000.
>>> Here the names of certain cities (Rome and Jorslem) survive.  Just as in
>>> BotNS, the world is pseudo-feudal with high-tech elements.  Earth is the
>>> clapped-out remnant of a hubristic interstellar empire and is now under
>>> the
>>> ownership of aliens.
>>>
>>> As far as I know Wolfe has never acknowledged any literary debt to
>>> Nightwings, although it was published around 1970.  Of course it may well
>>> be
>>> that he never read it and his and Silverberg’s visions evolved
>>> independently, albeit obviously from similar roots in Vance and
>>> elsewhere.
>>>
>>> - Gerry Quinn
>>>
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>>
>>
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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes