What's So Great About Ushas?

Roy C. Lackey · 06 Jun 2008, 06:38 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 01:38:33 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
Message-ID: <000a01c8c79f$f4814860$e2d04a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Dave Tallman wrote:
>Both of these moral arguments are missing something, in my view. They are
>only concerned with what happens to the human race. Environmentalists call
>this anthropocentrism, and they consider it a serious moral flaw.

**Moral** flaw? I almost choked on a mouthful of roast beef when I read
that! I've been a news junkie since at least the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet
it somehow escaped my notice that "Environmentalists" had become the
arbiters of morality.

> The whole
>Urth and its ecosystem was at stake, not just humanity. Typhon's empire
>started an interstellar war,

It did? Citation, please.

> and as a side effect the Sun was damaged. The
>whole Urth would lose millions of years of life, for countless species and
>new ones yet to evolve.

And the upheaval of continents and a worldwide flood left all those innocent
species unscathed? I wonder what Noah needed that Ark for.

> Is it a good and just solution for the human race to
>jet off into space and leave Urth to freeze? I don't think Wolfe would
>agree, based on his short stories like "Beautyland." Shouldn't humanity pay
>some price to put things right? (That's an argument that has some
>application today, too).

As Andrew (Thalassocrat) has already indicated, the human race had long ago
spread (during the First Empire) all over the galaxy, and probably beyond.
No matter what happened to Urth, the bulk of humanity would be unaffected.
If humanity had to pay a price on Urth, that price was almost entirely
symbolic. The Hierogrammates, for all their power, could not overcome
entropy. Humanity was spread too far and wide for every world to be
punished.

-Roy

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