do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

Gerry Quinn · 20 May 2011, 13:31 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 14:31:40 +0100
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
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Message-ID: <B0CDD563D31940DDBE0DB12F80374256@jill>

From: "Jeff Wilson" <jwilson at io.com>

> On 5/18/2011 6:31 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>> Then (a) what would be the "source" of the water (or rather of the
>> energy that drives the water) and (b) since surely people still live in
>> Tibet, was the Flood universal at all?

What is the basis for saying the flood is universal?  It is not predicted to 
be such in Dr. Talos's play - he says in fact that new continents will rise 
from the sea.  The old Autarch says the Ascians will survive the advent of 
the White Fountain better than the Commonwealth.  And there obviously isn't 
enough water to drown the continents anyway unless they are all flattened 
somehow to the same altitude.

> b) The global cooling of Sev's time could have rendered Tibet/Nepal/etc an 
> iced-over hinterland with too little oxygen even for genetic acclimation 
> by "real" people. But I would think that some of the underpeople must have 
> survived for mythic parallel reasons, and if they made it, there's no way 
> to rule out a few humans in the mix. Of course, Severian himself survives 
> to "contaminate" Ushas with the sins of Urth, so there might as well be 
> other Urth humans in the woodpile on that account as well.

I think there must be.

> a) The source of energy driving the Flood would be the tides from the 
> advent of the White Fountain. The only hints we are given as to its size 
> or scale is that its purpose  is to renew the sun, and that Typhon relates 
> he was told the sun had dimmed by 7 parts in a thousand IIRC. This could 
> mean a lot of things depending on which scaling laws we choose to 
> interpret it the value give, from 7/1000 the mass of the sun
> down to zero and back up to the same figure in negative mass. The 
> closeness of approach matters of course, but I can't recall if tides scale 
> by the third or fourth power of distance.

Either way, it doesn't really make much sense in terms of known physics. 
Gravitational radiation is not strong, and there is no obvious source of it 
except from the centre of the Sun, where perhaps the black and white holes 
will orbit each other for a time before merging.  But the frequency will be 
high and will couple poorly to geophysical systems, even if it would be 
strong enough.  (Gravitational radiation is so weak that nobody has managed 
to detect it directly from any source yet, although there is indirect 
evidence for it in certain pulsars.)

Of course, we don't know how the White Fountain was transported, and we must 
assume it was slowed down within the solar system, and maybe whatever means 
accomplished this created gravitational radiation or some other effect which 
disrupted Urth.

- Gerry Quinn

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