Dragaera

Linguistics and population

Fri Jul 23 11:22:45 PDT 2004

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 10:01:14 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:

>
>
>On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Chris Turkel wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jul 23, 2004, at 11:42 AM, Jose Marquez wrote:
>>
>> > Philip Hart wrote:
>
>> >> I've long wondered how the agrarian Dragaerans (say that 3x fast)
>> >> managed to cope with the overcast.  Perhaps they've been experiencing
>> >> diminishing crop yields for many cycles now... Also maintaining good
>> >> topsoil for 200k years is probably difficult.
>> >
>> > Magic?
>>
>> Thats the big thing that changes the standard equation; magic.
>
>
>Anybody know anything about agriculture?  I can vaguely imagine that
>it's possible to fix nitrogen in the soil by sorcery, but I can't see
>how the (pre-Interregnum) Empire could do that on many millions of
>acres multiple times per generation.  And I think that doesn't help with
>erosion (do we know that the Teckla till? [3x fast again]).
>
>And I certainly don't see how the calories the plants miss because of the
>overcast can be replaced.
>
>So perhaps that's one damper on the development of Dragaeran society.

Or perhaps the plants were as manipulated by the Jenoine as the
humans/Dragaerans were, to enable them to thrive under the overcast.

Heck, we still don't know what the Overcast actually /is/, do we?
What parts of sunlight does it block?  How much?