What's So Great About Ushas?

Roy C. Lackey · 07 Jun 2008, 08:58 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2008 03:58:25 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
Message-ID: <000a01c8c87c$a8a75e60$19d24a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Dave Tallman wrote:
>> >/ The whole
>> />/Urth and its ecosystem was at stake, not just humanity. Typhon's
empire
>> />/started an interstellar war,
>> /
>> It did? Citation, please.
>>
>"I have told you that I was autarch on many worlds. I shall be autarch
>again, and this time on many more," suggests an expanding empire outside
>our own solar system. Empires normally expand by war.

He certainly had ambitions; but he died and his dreams of empire died with
him. I still see no evidence that Typhon was waging an interstellar war,
still less that Urth's sun was damaged in consequence of waging it.

>> 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.
>>
>I meant "pay the price" in the sense of making a sacrifice rather than
>taking a punishment. To me, it is worth the short-term cost in lives to
>preserve the biosphere.

That's easy to say when you're not the one drowning in the flood. The
millions of people who did drown were not making any sort of sacrifice. They
weren't even consulted. That was my point earlier about the difference
between making a voluntary sacrifice and being the unwilling *victim* of
one. The people on Urth had done nothing to wound the sun; they had no part
in Empire; no part in the cruel fashioning of the Hierogrammates in another
universe. But they were punished just the same, punished to death.

-Roy

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