Cumaean???

Recursive Loop · 15 Dec 2007, 13:23 · 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: recursive_loop at yahoo.com (Recursive Loop)
Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 05:23:36 -0800 (PST)
Subject: (urth) Cumaean???
In-Reply-To: <BAY106-W179D52FA09EED2ECE1525385670 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <737545.83742.qm at web63904.mail.re1.yahoo.com>

"Lune is a tricky subject. We know it LOOKS bigger than now. That may be because its closer. Why
its closer we don't know. Maybe Wolfe assumes it would be closer do to gravitational attraction,
but thats wrong, because the Moon is actually getting farther away from Earth. Maybe it was
intentionally "pushed" towards the earth? Why I can't possibly understand. Some people say that
its mass was increased. Maybe, but what for and how?"

If it were terraformed, they might have pelted it with comets to build the atmosphere. That would
increase the mass. But they also might have pelted it with rocky or metal asteroids to build the
mass (and increase the gravity) to help retain that comet-pelting created atmosphere (speculation
here).

As for moving it towards Earth...If you can terraform a moon, maybe you want to move it as well to
decrease travel time? Or because you need a better light source in the sky to help you read those
futuristic eInk eBooks?

Moving it closer brings it closer to the Roche Limit. Cross that line and the Moon breaks up,
IIRC. I'm not sure where the Roche Limit is in the Earth-Moon system (looked through a few books
on the shelves, but haven't found it yet).

      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Looking for last minute shopping deals?  
Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.  http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping

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