{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/447",
    "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": 447,
    "subject": "a dog's life",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-03-27T02:53:00+00:00",
    "last": "1998-03-27T02:53:00+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0008-0670@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "m.driussi",
        "address": "m.driussi at genie.geis.com"
      },
      "date": "1998-03-27T02:53:00+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) a dog's life",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Reply:  Item #3679491 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET01#\n\nHello Damien Broderick, and welcome aboard!\n\nWay back when (deep in the archives?), I was arguing that the\nworld of \"Tracking Song\" was Mars-like if not Mars: the lesser\ngravity, the two moons.  I also thought that the sky mirror was\nreally a sky mirror, put there in geostationary orbit by the space\nbeings to reflect more sunlight onto the apparently ice age-locked\nworld in order to warm the surface and melt the ice.  Fairly\nstandard terraforming stuff, from the 1995 textbook (and presumably\nfrom popular sf long before then).\n\nI sure hope the world is not, as you suggest, a tide-locked\nsatellite!  (Oh wait--you didn't say \"satellite of a super jovian\nworld,\" which is what people always say when they are speculating\nalong these lines, hoping for a world like Titan, terraformed into\nsomething more comfortable.)  Science seems to work against such\nnotions.  If world is orbiting a jovian, then it is also bathed in\nsteady radiation from Van Allen belts.  If orbiting a terrestrial\nworld, and tide-locked, then its day is bound to be too long (i.e.,\nLuna's \"day\" is 28 days long); Roche Limit dictates how close in it\ncan come and not break up, yet the closer in, the larger the primary\nlooms (Luna looks plenty big now).  And, as you noted, it would seem\nimpossible for a satellite to have \"moons\" of its own, so these must\nbe reassigned to different orbits, meaning that for observers on the\n\"TS\" world they will not behave as \"moons\" but as \"planets.\"\n\n(I've been doing a lot of research on \"satellites of super jovians\"\nscenarios in the past year or so, FWIW . . . they first became\npopular probably due to Rand Corporation study PLANETS FOR MAN in the\n60s, but knowledge of our local jovians has increased much since then\nand put some rather titanic gashes into the whole concept . . . )\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}