"been teaching literature for over 35 years"

Sergei SOLOVIEV · 06 Sep 2013, 20:52 · from 2013-September.txt.gz

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From: soloviev at irit.fr (Sergei SOLOVIEV)
Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 22:52:00 +0200
Subject: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"
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Message-ID: <522A4070.4070407 at irit.fr>

J

To me one of the strongest points that can be used to rebuff Cook (who 
really seems to me a pompous idiot)
is that most of the answers can be found in BOTNs itself - like Lune 
(the moon) he overlooked.

I think one of the aspects of the world described by Wolfe is loss of 
memory/unreliability of information
Severian gets from others. Not long before, in times of Typhon, 
scientific information was much
more available. So, why should we/he believe that plate tectonics and 
volcanism really stopped?
And if it stopped, why? Maybe Erebus, Abaia etc; have their role in 
that? Who knows where
(how deep) their roots now are? But this fuzzy world picture is part of 
what Wolfe describes!

And poor Cook thinks that our actual theories (like plate tectonics 
recycling CO2) are absolute truth?

According to the story of Cyriaca recently Urth was controlled by 
machines. Could they not
(until recently) recycle all CO2? I think a very convincing answer may 
be built just on
careful reading of BOTNs itself.

Cheers

Sergei Soloviev

erry Friedman wrote:
>> The part about volcanoes, mountain building, and subduction, though, is probably based on "I remembered that we rowed across the crater of a volcano. Might it not have been the Cumaean's kettle? Urth's fires were long dead, as Master Malrubius had taught us..." I don't know of anything that contradicts that--is there something?
>>     
> .
> By the way, Cook has this part backwards.  He writes, "without vulcanism and tectonic plate induction in the ocean, carbon dioxide would not be removed from the atmosphere and recycled into the mantle where it can stay out of the atmosphere and not smother life."  However, subduction and vulcanism return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere after it's been sequestered in calcium carbonate on the sea floor.  Without plate tectonics, the atmosphere would lose all its carbon dioxide in a million years.
>  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=sZgB52BCa0UC&pg=PA173
>  
> If Urth's tectonic activity has in fact stopped, then Wolfe does fail to address the problem of disappearing carbon dioxide--if it was known when he was writing.  On the other hand, despite Severian's speculation that tectonicism might have stopped before the evolution of humanity, the actual stopping time might be much less than a million years before his time.
>  
> Of course, Erebus and Abaia might be scouring extracting the CO2 from oceanic calcium carbonate to keep the ecosystem going, and their reason for wanting to enslave humanity might be only that they need humans to help with this process.  Shortsighted of Severian not to go along.
>  
> Jerry Friedman
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