Crush on trial

James Wynn · 24 Mar 2005, 21:16 · from 2005-March.txt.gz

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From: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Thu Mar 24 21:16:36 2005
Subject: (urth) Re:  Crush on trial
References: <BE689BDB.4C678%adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <00c601c530f9$cf872e20$60a3f63f@wynnhouse>

>> Tony Ellis wrote:
>>Master Ashe says.
>>"At this time, many of your people are already gone," Master Ashe
>>continued. "Those you call the cagogens have mercifully carried them to
>>fairer worlds. Many more will leave before the final victory of the ice.
>>I am myself, you see, descended from those refugees." TCOTA. Chapter
>>XVII
>
>>I understood "many of your people" to be a
>>fraction of a small remnant of humanity surviving at the end of Old Sun's
>>lifecycle, and I understood "better worlds" to mean "better than Urth is 
>>at
>>the end of the Old Sun's life cycle."
>
>Even if the Urthians who would be evacuated would be only a fraction of
>Urth's population, they'd probably be more numerous than those who survive
>the New Sun's coming are; and hence their descendants would be more 
>numerous
>than the descendants of Urth's survivors in the timeline Sev picks.

I don't know why that would be. The Cold Urth generations are surely much 
less fruitful, die earlier, and lose more in childhood than the New Urth 
generations or generations on planets like Blue and Green. Each generation 
that is only a little more fruitful will yield exponential increases in only 
a few centuries. I have no idea how many Urthlings survived the Deluge, but 
I'm guessing more than you are, I think.

>>Green and Blue in "The Short Sun" are
>>undoubtedly better than Master Ashe's world
>
> They're better than being drowned, too.

Yes, but now you are being argumentative. They can't all be evacuated or 
Master Ashe would be studying a depopulated planet.

>> Severian has seen both outcomes.
>
>Iirc, he hasn't seen the New Sun, just heard about it from the green man.
>And when he did so he didn't know that the cost of the New Sun's arrival
>would be the death of Urth's current population.

I could be recalling wrong but I understood Sev was quite busy on those 
streams of Time.

~ Crush

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