vanished people=Hieros

Jeff Wilson · 11 Nov 2011, 04:01 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:01:49 -0600
Subject: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W16730E2DB96161E2BF3409CFDC0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W16730E2DB96161E2BF3409CFDC0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4EBC9E2D.8020506 at clueland.com>

On 11/10/2011 8:20 AM, Lee Berman wrote:
>
>
>> Ant?nio Pedro Marques: Btw, why is it that I keep imagining Blue with lots of ocean and
>> Green with very little? It's quite doubtful Green's jungles could be there without
>> oceans around.
>
>> Gerry Quinn: Because in Blue most of the people we meet live by the sea, and in Green they
>> all live in the jungle.
>
> Yes! I think this is on the proper path to understanding. Planetologically, Green might be
> expected to have oceans. But Green is not a planet. It is a literary creation. Larry Niven
> or some other hard SF writer would have mentioned oceans to keep the science believable. But
> Wolfe does not.

Larry Niven is not a particularly hard SF writer, and his planetary and 
biological sciences are a fairly weak area. He does have at least two 
marginally habitable planets with no oceans, and at least one habitable 
planet whose ocean is covered in green algae.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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