Moon and energy

mary whalen · 04 Jul 1998, 10:21 · from urth-v0015.mbox · original

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From: mary whalen <marewhalen at yahoo.com>
Subject: (urth) Moon and energy
Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 10:21:38
Message-ID: <urth-v0015-0108 at digest.urth.net>
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This is Sean Whalen (prion).

Quite a while ago there was some discussion about how much energy was
available from the planet Urth, and how much Abaia could get, as
opposed to the Commonwealth, and about the level of energy controlled
by humans in previous eras.

One of the methods of harvesting energy was from the tides created by
Lune, which has been moved closer to Urth than it was in our time.

What I'm about to say next isn't hinted at in the text at all (as far
as I'm aware), but it's just a possible process that I'd like to
speculate on.

It's possible that the technology of the people who terraformed the
Moon was very high (or it could have been any group after them,
really) and that instead of expending a huge amount of energy to
change the Moon's orbit, they actually gained an incredible amount of
energy by changing it.  If whoever changed the Moon's orbit had
powerful gravity absorption devices, they could have put them on the
Moon and absorbed gravitational energy until it reached the orbit they
wanted.

Currently, the Moon is moving farther away from Earth every second
because it's gravitationally absorbing energy from the Earth, which
has much greater rotational energy than the Moon.  This process would
normally continue until the Moon is much farther away than it is now
and they are both in rotational equilibrium (they would each only have
one face that pointed to the other, they'd retain their relative
positions when rotating).  The Moon would then have much more
rotational energy than it currently does.  However, on Urth, Lune is
apparently closer than it was in our time, which must have been
artificially produced.  The energy it lost in going to a lower orbit
must go somewhere.  If the humans (or whatever) just used explosions
to move them closer to each other, the gravitational energy would turn
into heat which would make both spheres quite a bit hotter and cause
earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.

As a final note, wouldn't the equilibrium state of the Earth and Moon
permit the building of a structure between them?  This sounds exactly
like the tower in To the Dark Tower Came.

prion
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