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Topic: About the Commander telling u about the Urquan (Read 8595 times)
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Freed of its ice, the antarctic would be a BETTER training ground, comparatively speaking. Of course, we would have a hard time in general since the ocean level would be ridiculously high, but I don't get the impression that they blasted the entire polar cap to the melting point.
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Elp
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There's a novel by a French person, of which I read an English translation, that writes of the technology of an advanced previous civilization, being buried under the antartic surface. Explorers find a man and a woman, and unravel the story of two ancient civilizations, more advanced than any that currently exist, who engage in a war with weapons so fearsome that it melts the entire crust of the earth to slag. The continents reshaped, and one scientist sought to preserve himself and one woman to...repopulate. His capsule was set to re-open when conditions outside the capsule became human-hospitable again.
Except that his capsule ended up near the south pole, where conditions would NEVER become human hospitable.
I believe that this is what is referred to by the antartic blasting. (The capsule would be something on the order of 20,000 years old, well in blasting range.)
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VOiD
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The continents reshaped,
This is not a theory exclusive to the book you mention. Charles Hapgood theorised that the Earth's entire crust; if the weight on one side of its axis reaches a certain point (for instance, if the Antarctic ice cap grows out of proportion); can shift violently. Due, of course, to the immense centrifugal pull generated by the Earth's rotation. Sort of like watching an unbalanced cogwheel suddenly break. This theory, which reportedly left Einstein "electrified", implies that continents that are now trapped under a mile and a half of ice may earlier have been temperate, even populated. Since no archaelogical finds have as yet poured out from below the ice, whether it really has been populated at some point, remains a purely academic question.
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« Last Edit: April 18, 2005, 08:58:50 pm by VOiD »
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Deus Siddis
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Why does it need to be one thing? The Ur-quan blew up human, arilou, and precursor sites. They didn't want to take any chances or have to do this whole thing again.
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Culture20
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There were a few posts made towards her a couple years back about RL stuff that could have been a little off-putting. I know she was going to lose her 'net connection for a few months, but I did kind of expect her back (and she probably is, under a different nic).
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FalconMWC
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Hmm... I doubt it - I think we could pick up that personality after a few months if the person posted regularly - maybe not though.....
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« Last Edit: April 20, 2005, 03:52:59 pm by FalconMWC »
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Art
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We don't know that the Ur-Quan's blasting Spathiwa was done the same way or for the same reasons as the blasting of Earth. It was probably similar, but the severity of the cultural cleansing probably varies.
I buy the psychological warfare theory more than the secret technologies theory. If there were anything there that the Kzer-Za needed they'd've taken it for themselves, not just blown it away. And I think we make a bit too much of how wise our ancestors were when talking about "secret technologies" and "ancient secrets" and so forth.
In any case: The random places blasted by the Ur-Quan are presumably meant to be really ancient, lost relics of various fictional civilizations. (Probably meant to be a one-off gag rather than an actual reference to these civilizations having existed in real life.)
"From their positions in orbit, the Dreadnoughts blew away a kilometer of land in central Iraq"
This is the Biblical location of the Garden of Eden, which is supposedly kept hidden from sight of humans by a guardian angel. Also would be somewhere near where the Tower of Babel fell.
"vaporized several targets in the Amazon rain forest"
Stories about amazing hidden civilizations in the Amazon are as old as, well, explorers in the Amazon. But see, for example, the TV series _Amazon_.
"punched a big hole through the antarctic icecap to destroy something deep under the surface"
In Lovecraft's science fiction, one recurring element was Kadath of the Cold Wastes, a ruined city buried deep under the Antarctic ice that was inhabited by the star-spawn (beings who came and lived on Earth long before humans) and contained all sorts of secret and forbidden knowledge and devices, including the shoggoths. (Paul and Fred clearly knew Lovecraft -- just look at the whole Androsynth/Orz scenario.)
"and melted a broad swath of the ocean floor in the south-eastern Atlantic."
Well, Atlantis, duh.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Are you saying the Ur-Quan thought it would be a psychological blow to destroy a fictitious city in the arctic which no one really believes exists anyway?
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Art
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Are you saying the Ur-Quan thought it would be a psychological blow to destroy a fictitious city in the arctic which no one really believes exists anyway?
*Ant*arctic. Probably, if TFB decided to take this throwaway reference really seriously and refer to it later on, they'd make some sort of reference to Kadath really existing, or something like it existing and having been written about by Lovecraft by some random set of coincidences (or just not mention Lovecraft at all). But we should be allowed to just take this as a shout-out to Lovecraft without having to justify it in our minds by figuring out how to cross over the SC2 and Lovecraft chronologies.
It is unmistakably a Lovecraft reference, since there's certainly no other fictional Antarctic city -- or, well, thing in the Antarctic woth blowing up -- that's well-known at nearly the same level.
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