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<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A title=severiansola@hotmail.com
href="mailto:severiansola@hotmail.com">Lee Berman</A> </DIV>
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<DIV><BR>> > Gerry Quinn: think about the power needed to stop and restart
the Moon in its orbit.<BR><BR>> Yep, a lot of energy. But not unimaginable to
me, if you have the entirety of</DIV>
<DIV>> planet Urth to draw upon. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>What do you mean by that, exactly? </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In fact, we do have some idea of the power needed to perform a resurrection
insofar as it is denumerable in units of watt-seconds or whatever. It is
about equal to the energy stored in one of the batteries used by the Ship for
internal life support. That won’t come close to stopping the Moon in its
orbit.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>> Consciously or not, isn't Severian a god? (actually </DIV>
<DIV>> he calls himself a "godling" at the end of the story). </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Godlings in Return to the Whorl are quite limited in their power. Of
course we don’t know exactly what Severian means by the word.</DIV>
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<DIV>> How much energy is needed to launch </DIV>
<DIV>> a human body to time travel? I'm no Einsteinian mathematician, but
</DIV>
<DIV>> converting and reconverting that much mass to tachyons and
back<BR>> seems like it would require one heck of a lot of
energy. </DIV>
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<DIV>Time travel is described in the story, and it doesn’t involve conversion to
tachyons. It is suggested that characters capable of time travel can
perceive more than three dimensions of space and run down certain corridors in
space time that are invisible and inaccessible to most of us. (These
corridors appear to be a good deal more accommodating and persistent than
current physics would suggest.) No particularly great expenditure of
energy is implied.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The Ship does travel faster than light, but no particle conversion is
indicated. Tachyons, if they existed, could not support chemistry
compatible with a biology even of tachyon-creatures. It is hard to see how
even a tachyonic atom could be stable.</DIV>
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<DIV>- Gerry Quinn</DIV>
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