What's So Great About Ushas?

Dave Tallman · 17 Jul 2008, 18:02 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:02:55 -0600
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
Message-ID: <1bf4dd40807171102l4513191bwa43b35f90eec5905 at mail.gmail.com>

Paul B wrote:

Even considering the physical implications of your suggestion, you make a
preposterous claim here without any evidence.  Presumably a white hole is
the only way to remove the black one.  What would it matter how much time
passes?  The physical anomalies produced by the New Sun don't care, unless
the black hole got a lot bigger after a few hundred years.  Given that it's
just had the sun to feed on, which it didn't even consume, it's unlikely.

Incidentally, it's curious that the introduction of the black hole didn't
have similar effects on Urth as that of the white one.

As for the suggestion that Hierogrammates went to stellar engineering just
to depose Typhon, it sounds like swatting a fly with a Buick.

There are two possible mechanisms for the white hole to disrupt earth:
thermal and gravitational. I believe the gravitational effects were
practically nothing: Baldanders only expected them to ring bells. He
predicted the Urth would have problems due to rising sea levels (ice
plus energy gives water) and to the heat causing shifts in the earth's
crust. The latter is hard to understand, but I suppose some unstable
faults could be triggered by changes in heat.

If the gravitational effects were really severe for either the white
or the black hole, then the Earth's orbit would be perturbed. We have
no hint that this was the case, and if it were it would cause even
more severe problems for Ushas.

Near Typhon's time, the Sun hadn't lost that much heat, so the sea
level hadn't dropped much due to increased ice at the poles. People
would not have settled in the new low-lying areas. (It's interesteing
that the Citadel was usable in Typhon's time. Was the wall perhaps a
sea-wall, and the river changed course to flow through later?)

The stellar engineering to depose Typhon was huge in its technological
power but subtle in its immediate effects. It might be thought of as
an economic sanction. Coming in with guns blazing would wipe out more
innocents in the short term.

Is there a problem with this, even if true?  I know some religions that
consider everyone to be a sinner.

It allows us to consider the Hierogrammates as imperfect but doing the
best they could, like the rest of us, instead of absolutely good or
absolutely evil, as we have tended to go in this discussion.

You seem to conveniently forget that Hierogrammates do possess foresight, in
addition to tech that allows creation of black holes.  These two alone
should suggest they can do pretty much any "mundane" thing (here, building
large ship(s) - [if Typhon could do it, they could too] and sending it to
point Urth) at pretty much any time, no?

I'll allow that they could get together a lot of ships, especially if
they only needed to get people off-planet temporarily and then dropped
them back when Ushas had settled down. But there's still the issue of
panic, and of people's willingness to go on the say-so of cacogens. I
don't think it would have been as easy as you think.
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