URTH |
From: mary whalen <marewhalen@yahoo.com> Subject: (urth) Moon and energy Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 10:21:38 This is Sean Whalen (prion). Quite a while ago there was some discussion about how much energy was available from the planet Urth, and how much Abaia could get, as opposed to the Commonwealth, and about the level of energy controlled by humans in previous eras. One of the methods of harvesting energy was from the tides created by Lune, which has been moved closer to Urth than it was in our time. What I'm about to say next isn't hinted at in the text at all (as far as I'm aware), but it's just a possible process that I'd like to speculate on. It's possible that the technology of the people who terraformed the Moon was very high (or it could have been any group after them, really) and that instead of expending a huge amount of energy to change the Moon's orbit, they actually gained an incredible amount of energy by changing it. If whoever changed the Moon's orbit had powerful gravity absorption devices, they could have put them on the Moon and absorbed gravitational energy until it reached the orbit they wanted. Currently, the Moon is moving farther away from Earth every second because it's gravitationally absorbing energy from the Earth, which has much greater rotational energy than the Moon. This process would normally continue until the Moon is much farther away than it is now and they are both in rotational equilibrium (they would each only have one face that pointed to the other, they'd retain their relative positions when rotating). The Moon would then have much more rotational energy than it currently does. However, on Urth, Lune is apparently closer than it was in our time, which must have been artificially produced. The energy it lost in going to a lower orbit must go somewhere. If the humans (or whatever) just used explosions to move them closer to each other, the gravitational energy would turn into heat which would make both spheres quite a bit hotter and cause earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. As a final note, wouldn't the equilibrium state of the Earth and Moon permit the building of a structure between them? This sounds exactly like the tower in To the Dark Tower Came. prion _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/