'Doomed' multitudes

Tony Ellis · 07 Apr 2005, 01:32 · from 2005-April.txt.gz

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: tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com (Tony Ellis)
Date: Thu Apr  7 01:32:04 2005
Subject: (urth) RE: 'Doomed' multitudes
In-Reply-To: <20050406003311.CD6E184D49 at che.dreamhost.com>
Message-ID: <000001c53b4c$4445b720$6401a8c0@TONYSPC>

Maru wrote
> I recollect the Undines said that they could have, at any
> moment taken 
> the Commonwealth
> but they forebore, to try and stop the New Sun.

What Joturna says is that Abaia "might have destroyed you... In a day,
or a few days. He's sought to tame you instead." UOTNS, XLIII.

Destroyed, not taken. Abaia wants humanity alive. 

> The sailors are shown the consequence of the New Sun fork,
> not the Ice Urth fork.

"Zak showed us that Urth had two futures... It could die and be born
new. Or it could go on living for a long time before it died forever."
UOTNS, XXII

Tzadkiel the Just shows the sailors that humanity drowns in one future,
but omits to mention that it is equally doomed in the other? Doesn't
sound very likely to me.

But this is all by the by. Nowhere in the books does it say that in the
Frozen Urth future humanity is enslaved by Abaia. Nowhere does it say
that branch of humanity is doomed. It says, quite categorically, that
life goes on.

> Please explain to me how you can say that N worlds of people (where N
> represents the totality
> of worlds colonized by man, including a revitalized Urth/Ushas) could 
> possibly only
> equal or be less (!) than N-1 worlds of people.

Because any attempt to predict which future will ultimately colonise the
most worlds is pointless speculation. The Green Men may eventually
decide Urth is so sacred they don't live on it at all. The Frozen Urth
people may build 50,000 ringworlds each with the surface area of a
thousand Urths. Rather more probably, both races will at some point
decide that they don't actually want to fill the universe to capacity
like mindless animals at all, and control their populations accordingly.

This is precisely why measuring what the New Sun achieves in terms of
future generations is a non-starter, as I've been saying for some time
now. The people on this list who suggest that it is worthwhile because
it may bring about the Hierogrammates at least have an argument.

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