Dragaera

Speculative Planetary Statistics for Dragaera (Math help?)

Sat Apr 8 10:00:33 PDT 2006

Sethra, from _Issola_, pg 37 (hardcover):

"[...] I cannot, in my own mind, imagine the cataclysm of the moment
when [the Great Sea] came into being, that instant when for the first
time the Unknowable took form."

She goes on to say that the existence of the Unknowable, now knowable,
meant there would eventually be a goddess of elder sorcery, and a Serioli
who made Great Weapons embodying it, and a human who built the Orb.  Also
that the J want the power thus represented.


Clearly reasonable evidence that the GS was the first amorphia, and
following Alexx's placement of these events at "~300,000 BI??" would
mean recent amorphia, so Jon's claim earlier is sensible, and I was
overly skeptical.


Note however that Sethra doesn't present any evidence that the GS was
the first amorphia - all her consequences follow regardless.  Maybe her
point is really that stable amorphia changed things. The Serioli may have
been making small evanescent amounts of contained amorphia since before
the J showed up (30M BI, Alexx hazards) for all she knows.  I think
it's likely that the J had some sense that Dragaera was an environment
that could support amorphia, as they seem to have had a lab experimenting
in something that on being sabotaged made amorphia, and they may have
been responsible for the amorphia-related genetics of the Kieron line.
Maybe they were also making small evanescent amounts of the stuff.

As a particle physicist, it seems unlikely to me that something might
exist in one place only, as Sethra says - but if so, then there's the
question of whether the stuff exists in the vacuum, which is full of
matter-antimatter pairs of everything.  And then there are the
issues of the spectrum of stuff produced in the Big Bang and from
Hawking radiation (if either is physical in the Dragaeran multiverse).

Note that the J were able to make a river of amorphia elsewhere, to
Sethra's great astonishment, so she may be overrepresenting her
understanding of the issue to Vlad.  And Vlad was able (I think)
to produce amorphia there as well.  Maybe Dragaera isn't so special
in this sense.


As an aside, either Sethra is lapsing into Paarfi-style with "I cannot,
in my own mind, imagine", or she does imagining in others' minds.