{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1039",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1039,
    "subject": "New Orbits, Old Urth",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-08-04T19:16:00+00:00",
    "last": "1998-08-04T19:16:00+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0017-0084@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "m.driussi",
        "address": "m.driussi at genie.com"
      },
      "date": "1998-08-04T19:16:00+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) New Orbits, Old Urth",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "GriffJon,\n\nHello and welcome aboard.\n\nAn immediate problem with giving Urth a new solar orbit is that it\nwill seriously mess up the calendar--that is, the solar year can't be\n365 days long, and so on.  Plus the arrival of a New Sun will\nprobably cause more trouble unless it is really just a \"new hemisun\"\nor some other fraction to account for the new orbital position: the\nnew sun would not be a restoration of the ancient order but rather a\nnew compromise.  (Venus fries, Mars freezes, film at eleven!)\n\nAnother unexamined consequence of having Sol's \"ecosphere\" (life\nzone, whatever you want to call it--the range between the boiling\npoint and freezing point of water) shrink so that Urth is trembling\non the edge of icy extinction is that Mars/Verthandi, by reason\nof being 1.5 times as far from the sun (well, =Mars= is that far, at\nleast), must already be much colder, i.e., well into the \"extinct\"\narea.\n\nWell fire up the Barsoomian Atmosphere plant, switch it to the\n\"Carl Sagan runaway greenhouse\" setting, cross your fingers, and\nfigure that the Verthandians get more terraforming perqs because they\npay more in taxes.\n\nOne of the many difficulties in assessing the Old Sun/Urth situation\nis that the Old Sun is =not= \"natural\"; that is, it isn't something\nthat astronomers have really seen.  (And while stellar engineering\ninvolving the introduction of black holes into stars has been\npublished in technical journals, they are not widely read, nor well\nunderstood, and by their nature are highly speculative to begin\nwith.) So we can't really model the Old Sun as a \"red dwarf\" star,\nbecause even though it is \"red\" it isn't really an M-type star; we\nmight get more mileage out of modeling it as a K-type \"orange\" star,\nbut even then the ecosphere shrinks down to around .5 AU, one half of\nthe solar orbit that Earth has.  Leaving us with something between\nG-type (our Sun) and K-type (the next cooler stage on the natural\nscale).\n\n(Also note that, to the best of my limited knowledge, there is no\nserious theory of Earth's ice ages which explains them as the effects\nof orbital shifts.  Ice ages are mysterious, there are various\nnotions as to why they start, how long they last, and why they end.\nWhy do I bring this up?  Because we struggle to attribute all Urth\nmalaise to an altered Sun, when in fact a lot of it might be just\nlike a severe ice age with \"mood lighting.\"  Just a thought.)\n\nBut all this is made more murky by the fact that there is much\ndisagreement over how wide the ecosphere bands are anyway.  That's\nScience for you!  As opposed to science fiction, where it is all\nabout \"story\" and there are never any arguments of any kind. <g>\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}