{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1016",
    "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": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1016,
    "subject": "Orbital mechanics",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-09-06T11:40:40+00:00",
    "last": "2000-09-06T11:40:40+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0011-0240@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Adam Stephanides",
        "address": "adamsteph at earthlink.net"
      },
      "date": "2000-09-06T11:40:40+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Orbital mechanics",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Alastair Reynolds wrote:\nRe: the orbital mechanics of Green/Blue - wasn't the best explanation,\nas worked out by someone here, that they're analogous to our moon and\nits small satellite partner Cruithne? It was pointed out that this\nhad been written up (in Nature I think) early enough for Wolfe\nto have incorporated it into the series."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I was the one who suggested Cruithne as relevant to the Blue/Green\nquestion.  (A couple of clarifications: it's not Earth's moon but Earth\nthat Cruithne is a companion of; and it's not a satellite of Earth, but\nrather shares Earth's orbit in a sense, although its actual orbit is a\ngood deal more complicated.)  I argued that something like Cruithne's\norbit would explain the data in OBW, including the indications that at\nconjunction Green moves perceptibly (from Blue) with respect to the\nfixed stars in the course of a night.  However, nobody else seemed to\nagree about Green's movement, or indeed about Cruithne as a likely\nmodel.  Or if they did, they didn't post it."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": " Or was there some fatal flaw in that idea?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Not that I recall; people just didn't go for it.\n\nThe problem with this stuff (one reason why I stopped working on it) is\nthat you're dealing not with what is possible or probable, but with what\nWolfe thought was possible or probable, and we have no way of knowing\nthat short of asking him.  (The same applies to the inhumi\ntransportation question.)"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "And Robert Borski wrote:\nAlso for mantis: where does the Whorl orbit in your opinion? Around Blue?\nGreen? Or some Lagrange point between (or outside?) the binary planet\nsystem?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "As I once posted, the fact that conjunction between Blue and Green\noccurs only once every six years seems clearly to imply that Blue and\nGreen do not form a binary system, but orbit the Short Sun\nindependently; and this seems to be the consensus on the list, as well. \nAs for the Whorl, the since its conjunctions with Blue are even rarer,\nand it approaches less closely to Green at conjunction, I assumed that\nit too orbited the Short Sun independently.  Do you have any reason for\nthinking otherwise?\n\n--Adam\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}