Green's diameter, angular and otherwise

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 13 Mar 2002, 17:07 · from urth-v0203.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) Green's diameter, angular and otherwise
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 09:07:28 -0800
Message-ID: <urth-v0203-344 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0203/344.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Mantis wrote:

> > Using the Moon as a model.
> >         ORBIT      ANGULAR DIAMETER
> > MOON    240,000    0.52 degrees
> > LUNE    150,000    0.83 degrees
> > GREEN   105,000    1.18 degrees
> > So even a puny world like the Moon (diameter 2160 miles) would be more
> > than twice the size of the Moon in our sky when located at a distance
> > attributed to Green.
> >=20
> > A twin planet would naturally be much bigger.
> >=20
> > Based upon this, the Bluvian astronomer is quite likely to be waaaay off
> > in his estimate of the "closest approach" distance as being 35,000
leagues.

... for which I am frankly grateful, because it seems to me to drive the
final nail into the "Blue =3D Urth" theory's coffin, based on past discussi=
ons
herein.

Then Jerry F. asks:

> How are you thinking the Bluvian astronomer would make his estimate?
> I can't think of a method that would be thrown off by Green's large
> size. =20

I don't believe Mantis is referring to the Bluvian astronomer's "method"
but simply to his result.=20

At one level, Mantis refers to the description of Green, seen from Blue,=20
as a "baleful eye." A twin planet, or even the moon, seen at the distance=20
of 105K miles, would be rather too large for an "eye" to be, at any rate,=20
the most obvious metaphor.=20

More important: from present evidence, it appears that Green, Blue, and=20
Urth have fairly similar surface gravity (the evidence is, admittedly,=20
negative: there is no mention of a sensation of weighing more or less,=20
no sense that thrown or swung objects behave differently, etc., and it
is reasonable to suspect that _something_ of the sort would be mentioned)=20
-- indeed, all these seem to be fairly close to the accelerational=20
"gravity" of the Whorl at "ground" level.=20

(BTW, the whole issue of the Fliers in a separate thread seems to miss=20
the point that they rarely - never voluntarily? - come near "ground"=20
level.)=20

This being the case, Green needs to be at least somewhat similar in=20
mass to Urth. Such a mass passing within 105K miles of Blue would have=20
effects not terribly dissimilar to the effect of the passing of the=20
White Fountain on Urth. (And, of course, vice versa for Green.) The=20
effects described for the conjunction do not come close: for example,=20
the Narrator mentions extreme tides, but apparently they are not so=20
extreme as to swamp a seaside town (New Viron) or to make a home near=20
the shore of an oceanic island (Horn's hut) infeasible over a period
of decades.

> Anyway, the higher the true distance, the harder the problem of how
> the inhumi cross.

True, but in any event the problem of how the inhumi cross between
Bleen and Grue is trivial next to the problem of how Remora (and,
apparently, other inhumi) achieved the crossing to the Whorl. If I
recall correctly, a Neighbor mentions to Horn that they (the Neighbors)
sent them (the inhumi) - but does not describe how this was done.=20

--Blattid

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net