When Yu comes to tell Sundaram about the threat to reality, there is appropriate weather: rain, wind, lightning and thunder. When she enters and closes the door, a gust tries to seize it. When it has become clear that she has something terrible to relate, wind hoots. When he holds her hand, it is colder than that external weather. When he protests that living beings, less than dust motes, cannot menace creation, lightning blazes, darkness returns and thunder sounds like monstrous wheels. (Thor?) When she has explained more and he sits mute, rain slashes and wind keens.
This weather is the continual backdrop to the discussion summarized in the two previous posts. My summary is a mixture of paraphrase and quotation. Of course I urge blog readers to read or reread Poul Anderson's text.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree with Sundaram, I cannot see human beings, or any incarnate intelligent beings, as being threats to the reality and existence of the cosmos.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean:
That sounds to me too much like the claim that humans could not possibly affect the climate.
In either case we need to look at the evidence for the claim that some human action *could* have a noticeable effect on some large system.
The universe being much larger than the earth it would take humans acting on enormous scales to affect something of such enormous scale. However, see the sort of thing Tipler suggested human descendants might do in IIRC "Physics of Christianity".
Kaor, Jim!
Localized damage is certainly possible. But I simply can't see human beings going to the trouble and bother of blowing up the universe--never mind being able to do that!
I don't recall that bit from Tipler's book, despite reading THE PHYSICS OF CHRISTIANITY years ago. Yet another book I should reread!
I do recall how Tipler's work affected how Anderson wrote THE AVATAR. Like WAR OF THE GODS it was one of those books by Anderson I didn't much like the first time I read them. But, I came to have a much higher opinion of them with second readings.
Ad astra! Sean
As I recall it, Tipler's idea depended on the Universe eventually starting to contract. Intelligences existing at that time could somehow arrange for the contraction to be asymmetrical so these entities could use the temperature difference between the directions contracting faster & the directions contracting slower to run heat engines to keep themselves 'alive'.
I *think* this was in "Physics of Christianity" and when I read it, it sounded like there was a lot of iffy speculation to the idea.
Kaor, Jim!
When explained like that it does sound much more appealing. And Tipler was writing at the very furthest fringes of physics/cosmology in THE PHYSICS OF CHRISTIANITY. Which is fine with me--scientists should sometimes let their hair down and go really far out in their speculations!
Ad astra! Sean
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