(urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

Interesting thought. Could the New Sun restart Urth's tectonic activity and thus its CO2 cycle? Would that put Floodmaster Severian and the Evil Twins on the same side?


As it happens, I'm reading an old Poul Anderson story about terraforming Venus. The colonists intend to flood the planet by starting up its dead vulcanism, releasing the water supposedly trapped in the mantle and spreading it across the surface. They also are busy converting the paraformaldehyde/CO2 atmosphere into water and oxygen.

Now THAT'S science fiction! None of this silly torturer nonsense.




>________________________________
> From: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
>Sent: Friday, September 6, 2013 1:48 PM
>Subject: Re: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"
> 
>
>>The part about volcanoes, mountain building, and subduction, though, is probably based on "I remembered that we rowed across the crater of a volcano. Might it not have been the Cumaean's kettle? Urth's fires were long dead, as Master Malrubius had taught us..." I don't know of anything that contradicts that--is there something?
>.
>By the way, Cook has this part backwards.  He writes, "without vulcanism and tectonic plate induction in the ocean, carbon dioxide would not be removed from the atmosphere and recycled into the mantle where it can stay out of the atmosphere and not smother life."  However, subduction and vulcanism return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere after it's been sequestered in calcium carbonate on the sea floor.  Without plate tectonics, the atmosphere would lose all its carbon dioxide in a million years.
> 
>http://books.google.com/books?id=sZgB52BCa0UC&pg=PA173
> 
>If Urth's tectonic activity has in fact stopped, then Wolfe does fail to address the problem of disappearing carbon dioxide--if it was known when he was writing.  On the other hand, despite Severian's speculation that tectonicism might have stopped before the evolution of humanity, the actual stopping time might be much less than a million years before his time.
> 
>Of course, Erebus and Abaia might be scouring extracting the CO2 from oceanic calcium carbonate to keep the ecosystem going, and their reason for wanting to enslave humanity might be only that they need humans to help with this process.  Shortsighted of Severian not to go along.
> 
>Jerry Friedman
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20130906/45447a64/attachment-0004.htm>