--- Grady Brandt <gbrandt at tampabayfcu.org> wrote: > > On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 14:44:44 -0700 (PDT), lazarus wrote: > > >On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Robert Sallade wrote: > > > > > >Sorry - I was using "industrial" loosely - in the Dragaeran context > > >sorcery is industry. In the snippage I said the updated Orb might be > > >"a cleaner technology". > > > > But we still don't know what it does, exactly, and how it interacts > > with the vegetation on Dragaera. What if the only thing it cuts from > > the sun's radiation is a specific element of the visible spectrum, and > > the plants have evolved (or been engineered with) an alternate form of > > photosynthesis? > > Perhaps something less than detrimental comes from the Overcast. It > might > "rain fertilizer" in Dragaera, some portion of the Overcast coming down > in > the rain providing a supplement that offsets the lack of sunlight. Indeed. For all we know, it could use left-over sorcerous energy to *raise* the energy of the infrared in Furnacelight, thus shifting it up to orange and supplying more energy for crops. (It would also scatter the light, but that wouldn't make much difference to the available energy.) That's what's technically known as a "fanwank"--there's a good chance that Steven (or Adrian C. Morgan) just wanted the "elfs" to live in a realm of perpetual twilight and didn't worry about the consequences--but I think it shows that this problem doesn't have to puzzle us. > Or maybe that just explains the topsoil. As people have been pointing out, our current topsoil problem has a lot to do with modern intensive agriculture, and ways to preserve topsoil have been known for a long time. Anyway, if you can use sorcery to heal people, you can use it to fix nitrogen, even if you don't know what nitrogen is. Not to mention phosphorus, potassium, and all those micronutrients that fertilizer makers want me to pay a lot of money for. Jerry Friedman __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail