Urth Net
Typhon & the Whorl (was Prior Race On Blue And Green)
↰ answers gwern0 at gmail.com
· by quotation
36 quoted lines · 1–2 deep
At 03:26 AM 12/17/2007, gwern wrote:
On Dec 16, 2007, at 9:50 PM, Michael Dale wrote:
Who is the Undine that exist on Blue? It is not Scylla if she is also
on Urth I think. (so long that SilkHorn cannot time travel)
I heard someone say that the undines put a blackhole in the sun. I
don't think so since they want to survive on the Urth also.
I don't know that I like this idea, but it's a new one to me:
What if the Whorl never actually GOES anywhere?
I've wondered before what the acceleration means in terms of whether its
bodies of water stay put, and whether that gives a maximum and minimum
time for its trip.
But what happens if the Whorl just kinda wanders around the Solar System
for a few centuries, or millennia, or aeons, and Silk's trip to meet
Severian is "mere" time travel, not spatial travel? What if Blue and
Green are Earth and Venus in the future after the arrival of the New
Sun?
I now need to think and read and see whether that's at all internally
consistent.
Another sort-of-snarky point: what if TBot*S isn't meant to be
hard SF?
Maybe we're just supposed to read it as The Dying Earth written by
someone who can really, really write (look, I like Jack Vance too, but
he's no Gene Wolfe), and who has read his Borges.
Adam
That might work. It's been used in hard sci-fi before; I think particularly of Baxter's Xeelee Sequence and Ring.
You would expect the Whorl to accelerate to near-C for a few decades. The gravity both on Blue and Green as well as the Whorl seem to be as close to normal as makes no difference, so our acceleration/deceleration could be at most 1.0Gs of accel. It would take a while to reach .9c, but if we grant 150/1500 years for the initial acceleration, that's more than enough to get a very very high velocity, and spend a couple decades hanging around at ridiculous time dilations. I mean, I don't know the math, but I suspect fractions of millions of years are possible here. Baxter has the Great Northern spend 1000 time-dilated years, ending up 5 million years after launch; 300 years ought to get us at least 1 million years into the future.
That scenario gives us some stuff to look for: acceleration and then deceleration would probably be symmetrical, so we could expect to see some signal or occurrence some decades before 'arrival' when the Whorl stopped accelerating or coasting and began the deceleration from relativistic speeds.
We could also expect signs of even more advanced age in the universe, but given that Sol would've been rejuvenated at this point by Severian, I'm hard-pressed to say what those signs would be.
And further, why would Typhon send a colony off into the far future to a world he already solidly ruled? In Ring it was because the vessel was dragging around one end of a wormhole, while the other end remained in the past; a wormhole allowing timetravel between megayears has obvious utility, but what good does planting a colony in the far future do? Preventing the extinction of humanity is an obvious goal, but that seems awfully altruistic for Typhon.
I agree that Typhon would never do anything out of altruism. I'm not sure what you mean by "a world he already solidly ruled." Typhon was abandoned and besieged and was awaiting the arrival of the Conciliator to free him of Piaton's stubborn hold on his involuntary functions (which he did and he did, lol). Remember during his brief discussion with Severian, Typhon is absolutely arrogant. This and personal survival are his twin drives for injecting a copy of himself into the Whorl project and hijacking it. Being STL, no one saw it's utility in escaping the global cooling "disaster" that had befallen the Earth. I don't think it was built from the ground up (or shiprock in) as a personal vessel for Typhon's digital self and its amusement. The time frame is too long and his position too tenuous for him to oversee it's completion. Typhon simply copied himself into the mainframe and created it's religion or inserted himself in it as it's Godhead and his treacherous family as pantheon of lesser gods.
Whatever the original design, I think Typhon wanted the Whorl to return to Earth after things calmed down after a few centuries to "recolonize" using technical experts released from suspended animation to start fixing things, millions of peons that worshipped him as a god to provide the labor and armies of chems to reestablish order. Then they could either revive the original Typhon or if he was lost Pas could download into a suitable body and reestablish his empire and glory.
Evidently something went wrong with his plan when he was deposed by his children and the inhumani hijacked the ship and redirected it to Green/Blue.
Dan