Severian's miraculous eclipse

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 26 Apr 2006, 06:55 · from 2006-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:55:59 +1000
Subject: (urth) Severian's miraculous eclipse
Message-ID: <20060426065600.CB804DA81A at mailserver7.hushmail.com>

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:32:11 +1000 I wrote:

>I tend to side with the Tzadkiel ship explanation, but it is 
>interesting to think about what it was doing there & at that time. 
>
>
>Maybe it was dropping a black hole into the sun? This would be a 
>nice touch, I think: the beginning of the end of the Old Sun and 
>the distant birth of the New, at about the same time. 
>
>I've always assumed the black hole thing happened around the time 
>of Typhon, but is that necessarily the case? 
>
>The death of the Old Sun is clearly a long, long process: how long 
>
>must have the black hole been eating away at it, for the effects 
>to 
>be noticeable by Typhon's time?

FWIW, a long time from black hole insertion to noticeable effect on 
Urth is consistent with solar physics. Eg from the often-reliable 
Wikipedia: 'Estimates of the "photon travel time" [from core to 
photosphere] range from as much as 50 million years to as little as 
17,000 years.'

In story terms, I don't have UOTNS here, but isn't there a 
reference to the death of Apu Panchu being the death of the Old 
Sun? Or something like that.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net