Cumaean???

Jeff Wilson · 15 Dec 2007, 09:25 · from 2007-December.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 03:25:45 -0600
Subject: (urth) Cumaean???
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370712141200k209903avf0a5867929f8f0eb at mail.gmail.com>
References: <4E82554550FE5149AD4B30A4FEA22492BFB7C4 at xchange.briercrest.ca>	<1197651438.5684.25.camel@todd-desktop>	<BAY106-W34FB3C9388BC95D059EC6E85670 at phx.gbl>
	<1f7617370712141200k209903avf0a5867929f8f0eb at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <47639D99.2090902 at io.com>

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> On Dec 14, 2007 11:07 AM, Pedro Pereira <domus_artemis at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Severian time can be from
>> 100.000 years to 1 million years in the future, but the Sun at that time
>> will be as "healthy" as it is now. I think the reason behind the "dying Sun"
>> is artificial. Maybe something done by the Hierogrammates or by Tartaros
>> (black hole in the hearth of the Sun?).
> 
> We are told explictly that there is a black hole in the heart of the Sun, and
> it is at least implied that the HieroFoos put it there.

I thought it was Scylla, or one of that lot. though, I suppose they 
could have done it with some Hiero

> But I think 100K to 1M years is too short a time: some serious geology takes
> place between Sev's time and ours, enough so that human structures
> (made of materials strong enough to endure the process) are subducted
> into the ground and then uplifted as part of mountains. I'm not sure how
> long orogenesis actually takes, but I'm guessing it's on the order of millions
> of years. Any geologists in Da Howse?

Not a degreed geologist, but proper orgenesis takes millions of years as 
does most any plate tectonic process. I don't think this length of time 
can be supported in the face of the translator's comment that he has 
photographed contemporary buildings that still exist in Severian's time.

The juxtaposiiton of fossils and human artifacts can be explained by 
Severian interpreting what finds in terms of his eclectic education, 
"fossils" actually being sculptures or artificially petrified items like 
the bodies at Saltus, or any of number of deep time scenarios detailed 
in previous SF and hinted at in SWORD around p.75. (morlocks, alien 
colonies, abandoning the surface after atomic wars, etc.).

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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