{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/986",
    "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": 986,
    "subject": "Blue/Green orbits, and other things",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-08-28T14:56:24+00:00",
    "last": "2000-08-28T14:56:24+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0011-0196@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at sirius.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-08-28T14:56:24+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Blue/Green orbits, and other things",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "First off, welcome John Clute: we honor you as \"First Tracker\" and \"Major\nInspiration\"! <everybody give the big Wolfe Howl>\n\nSecond, thank you Nigel Price for the symposium report.  Sounds like it was\nreally great!\n\nFinally, the latest saga of \"(more) Orbital Thoughts\" (heh).  With IGJ it\nseems to me that the model for Blue and Green is more like what we first\nthought, that is, Blue is to Earth as Green is to Venus.  Green has an\norbital eccentricity that brings it frighteningly close--really, this is\nspitting distance.\n\nI visualize it this way: Blue's orbit as a circle, Green's orbit as\negg-shaped (should be an oval, but still). Blue pokes its way around the\ncircle, Green careens around in a fraction of the time it takes Blue; and\nevery six years they have their closest encounter.  Every year Green\narrives at that spot of apocentron (furthest from the star), but only every\nsixth year is Blue actually there when it arrives.\n\nSo Green rides from the inner edge of the ecosphere out to the middle or\nmid-outer edge.  (This \"ecosphere\" [known by a number of different names]is\nthe band of orbital space where water can be in a liquid state: inside the\ninner edge, water boils off; outside the outer edge, water freezes up\npermanently.) In our solar system, we would have to move Venus outward to,\nsay, .75 AU (the width of the ecosphere is contested by some) at its\npericentron and 1 AU for its apocentron.\n\nDoes anybody recall what we know about the length of years on Blue?  We\nsafely assume that the Whorl years are Urth years, but how close to that\nstandard are Blue years? (I've recently been giving myself a headache\n[again, mind you!] over the length of years in 5HC . . . )\n\n\"Some call it a cattle barge, but others call it the `Love Boat'\"; or\nanother observation on young inhumi on Blue: hey, don't forget the landers\nthat make the crossing from time to time.\n\n=mantis=\n\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}