STIRLING STUDIES 2: LORDS OF CREATION TERRAFORM VENUS; BUT WHAT  THE EFFECTIVE POINT OF DIVERGENCE?

 

B. Lukács

 

President of the Matter Evolution Subcommittee of the Geonomy Scientific Committee of HAS

 

CRIP RMKI, H-1525 Bp. 114, Pf. 49, Budapest, Hungary

 

lukacs@rmki.kfki.hu

 

ABSTRACT

            S. M. Stirling is writing books in Alternate History. Besides the obvious evolutionary connections, these books suggest lots of interesting scientific or scholarly problems, some discussed in the books, some not. In his Lords of Creation cycle in an Alternate History very advanced aliens terraformed Venus & Mars 200 My ago; this is PoD. But the terraformation does not influence Earth too much for a while, and in twentieth century AD still Stalin, Kennedy & de Gaulle are the political leaders. Is this a self-consistent picture? And if it is, what is the effective terrestrial PoD? For an answer various sciences and scholarships must be combined. The result will be that terrestrial history started to diverge on the two timelines in 1932 (with the Adams-Dunham measurements, and the last transplantation of humans to Venus happened sometimes between 9500 & 7500 BC.

 

0. PROLOGUE

            S. M. Stirling is producing a big variety of Alternative History sci-fi’s. Alternative History is a subclass of sci-fi’s, where the fantasy does not enjoy its unlimited freedom. In an ideal AH story only one event has other outcome than on our timeline (that is the PoD, Point of Divergence), especially an event which "might have happened as well otherwise", by other words, where even now we do not know if the particular outcome was necessary or not. (Here I omit philosophical discussions of Free Will, determinism/indeterminism, the Everett Theory of Quantum Mechanical Measurement and such, for simplicity.) So at PoD one event has another outcome, and then the author continues the story, with as strict "causality" as possible. Of course the PoD acts then as an initial condition different than in Our TimeLine (OTL). Then the author elaborates this Alternative History.

            Now, we do not yet know if such concurrent timelines can be realised "synchronously", or not. (Against the a priori impossibility of the alternative see Everett's famous paper [1].) But even this were impossible, the elaboration is edifying. Anyway, if one believes in Free Will (this is religion-dependent, of course), one should think over the alternatives before any important decision.

            The machinery can be demonstrated by means of, e.g., Poul Anderson's works. In Eutopia [2] a modern (c. 1970 AD) Greek social researcher from a timeline where Alexander III of Macedon did not drink himself exactly into death but after some time recovered, so Aristotle did not have to leave the Lyceum  in 322 AD, can switch timelines, and explores one where Alexander did die prematurely, but the Tours-Poitiers battle in 732 AD had an outcome opposite than in OTL. So the Frankish Kingdom became weaker, the Pippin-Charlemagne line could not substitute the Merovings, so in the next 200 years Dane Vikings & Magyars destroyed the Western Christian civilisation. In 1970 AD Danes can be found in Canada & Minnesota (Anderson's state) and Magyars along the Mississippi (Dakoty). In another mininovel [3] Sulmanu-Assaridu King of Assyria took Jerusalem in 701 BC (this was the probable outcome; we still do not know what happened, but the Holy Bible is also not too definite). Then no Judaism from VII c. BC upward, so no Christianism either; the Roman Empire breaks down in a somewhat less dramatic way, in 1976 AD the Visigothic Kingdom is the strongest Mediterranean power, Mithraism is the strongest religion on Southwest, Mazdaism in Southeast, and the North is pagan. And again: Danes in Canada & Minnesota and Magyars in the Mississippi Basin.

            S. M. Stirling works in the AH scheme. In one sequence (Lords of Creation [4], [5]) the PoD was 200 My in the past; a superhuman civilisation terraformed Venus & Mars, and from time to time they imported new animals & plants to the other two planets. Terrestrial history was practically not influenced until 1947 AD, when astronomers detected the habitable planetary surfaces. Therefore Cold War went to space. The Draka sequence of Stirling puts the PoD to somewhere at the second half of the XVIIIth century, Northern American loyalists go to South Africa, so the XXth century will be very, very different. (But this sequence is par excellence Military SF, so I ignore it completely.)

            Now, Stirling & Flint invented a somewhat different new AH scenario. (I think Stirling was somewhat earlier, but Flint in the 1632 Universe of Assiti Shards has a big net of collaboration, so novels are published rather fast.)

            The idea is "simple". A tremendously superhuman ET civilisation sends back a negligible part of our contemporary Earth into the past, and replaces the surface with the past one. In Flint's 1632 [6] a West Virginian small miner town of 2000 is sent back to Thuringy in 1631, the heyday of the Thirty Year War.

            Stirling's somewhat similar scheme produced so far 6 full novels, 1 novelette, a 7th novel is just being published, and 1 in preparation [7-15]. In [7-10] Something sends back the Island of Nantucket and its immediate maritime neighbourhood from 1998 AD to 1250 BC. The Nantucketers sometimes discuss what may have happened, and they agree that most probably the 1250 BC Nantucket emerged in 1998 AD, but, of course, they cannot check. Then [11] is the opposite viewpoint: post-Change USA. Some Superhuman agency slightly changed some Physical Laws on the 1998 surface of Earth, so that the Boyle-Mariotte Gas Law changes, so gasoline engines do not work, gunpowder merrily burns but does not detonate, steam engines can work only with negligible efficiency and there is no electric current (I do not yet understand the relation of the last change to the previous ones). High energy 1998 civilisation breaks down and the overwhelming majority of Humanity dies out; but at some centers good organisers found a post-Change civilisation, a viable hybrid of XXth century and High Middle Ages. And then [14] starts to sew together [7-10] with [11-13], and with more Realities as well. I conjecture that in a few years Stirling will write something establishing a link between the Lords of Creation and the Nantucket anomaly.

            While this opus is not yet comparable in size and details with that of Honoré de Balzac, it may be later; and while Balzac had to know only his present society and its immediate past, Stirling is confronted with scientific problems, and with a number of different societies. True, the scientific problems are not direct. Earthpeople do not understand the Lords of Creation; not even the bioscience of Martian hominids. But Stirling should; or at least has to make the impression he knows more about than us.

            So far he generally fulfils the expectations. But the opus is a challenge for somebody (I mean myself) who is the President of a Matter Evolution Subcommittee. Evolution of sciences, evolution of languages, evolution of hominids...

            I am going to make a series of comments of that opus. That will not be criticism. Nobody is interested if I like or dislike a book. Rather I am going to discuss different items in the books from the viewpoint of the actual science (or, sometimes, scholarship).

            Sometimes this is really a challenge. E.g. Lords of Creation definitely use a physics unknown for us. And our present physics is not the Physics. For 2000 years it was not only elementary experience but also Fundamental Theory that there is no Motion (at least, except for transients) without Force. People generally believe that Aristotle was stupid and the later generations did not dare innovate; but Aristotle did know that his theory was not yet complete. See his own words about the problem of ballistics (spears and arrows) [16]. In Chap. 32 of Mechanics he writes: "Why is it that an object which is thrown eventually comes to a standstill? Does it stop when the force which started it fails, or because the object is drawn in a contrary direction, or is it due to its downward tendency, which is stronger than the force which threw it? Or is it absurd to discuss such questions, while the principle escapes us?" (Italics are mine.) The paragraph is clear enough even it contains only questions. The Stagirite did know that ballistics was at best very difficult to describe even in his theory; and he was not able to do. Still, missiles flew; and later somebody would improve even his description.

            Before Einstein's success not only everybody in physics was convinced that Flow of Time was independent of spatial motions; everybody believed that even a doubt would be meaningless. Special Relativity appeared a mere 103 years. Similarly, until the formulation of Quantum Mechanics (more or less 1926) physicists were convinced that any object has its sharp momentum and position, although maybe we do not know them; and similarly that one object cannot be simultaneously here and there. It seemed defetism to question the first statement and unscientific magic the second. That was 82 years ago.

            Our present science will be so primitive and untrue for the XXVth century as the Aristotelian physics for us. Still, Aristotle was a true scientist (while Platon, Marcion, Plotinos and Melanchton were not), as a true physicist as  e.g. Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Our present physics will not be substituted by a free choice of personal theories (Aquarius or not Aquarius) but by a still unknown new theory explaining what the previous theory did and some further ones as well. And then, after a time the next theory will be disproven as well...

            Stirling's books show alternate realities. We know only one of them; but there may be others. But are the stories consistent at least with our present knowledge plus the assumption that Alternate Realities can exist? This is a nontrivial but very interesting question.

            In this study I concentrate on the first Volume of Stirling's Lords of Creation series [4], but I will discuss shortly the second Volume [5] too. In this series Somebody has terraformed both Venus and Mars and transplanted living organisms thither from Earth. The terraforming happened geological times ago; still Earth is quite similar to ours: politicians and writers of our 50's and 60's are mentioned. For a literary critic the question would be: is the author self-consistent or not? But for me, physicist and president of an evolutionary subcommittee the really interesting question is different.

            Of course nobody can prove that alternate realities would exist simultaneously, even if Everett's Measurement Postulate [1] requires it. (And the equally good von Neumann Axiom requires the opposite.) We may play together with S. M. Stirling accepting an alternate reality (if it is self-consistent). Its existence does not contradict our observations (by construction); and if it has been written self-consistently (for me it seems it has), then it is not self-contradictory. However, there remains a point, not discussed in the novel: what effective (terrestrial) PoD resulted from the terraformation which itself may have happened geological ages ago but whose terrestrial impact may have remained negligible again for geological ages? (Some people interpret the Butterfly Simile literally. It cannot be done; for this see Appendix A.)

             The reader will see that for the determination of the effective PoD one must use astronomy, physics, biology and politology simultaneously. Also, it will be seen that, if alternate realities exist, then one can reconstruct the alternate TimeLine from meager information + the knowledge of Natural Laws, which must, of course, be the same on any TimeLine.

 

1. VENUS ON THE TIMELINE OF THE LORDS OF CREATION (LCTL)

            The time of the story of [4] is 1988-1990, but earlier events are mentioned back to the end of WWII; no information suggests any deviation during WWII from Our TimeLine (OTL). The main actors are situated in Jamestown, Gagarin Continent. Jamestown is the Venusian base of the WestBlock; the story mentions only American and British, but the next story [5] more formally names the cooperation of USA, Commonwealth, OAS & Japan. The opponent force, the EastBlock, is mainly the Warsaw Pact & China, but I guess that some other Asian countries are involved too, most probably Mongolia, North Korea & North Vietnam. The European Union is a relatively negligible third player, and seems to be composed from the 6 original members from the 50's (Luxemburg, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Western Germany & France) + Spain having entered in 1968. (I wonder about the status of Portugal; maybe EFTA. It would definitely not go with Spain into a France-led Communauté Économique Européenne, after 600 years of the alliance with England against France & Spain.) The relations between the Big Blocks are not friendly but not openly hostile either. The information is solely about the Arctic continent Gagarin. First lander with TV was EastBlock in 1962 (at Mars it was Western). First manned landing was also EastBlock in 1981, but the WestBlock landed in next year too.

            At the first half of [4] biologist Samuel Feldman and geologist Cynthia Whitlock discover the Anomaly of Venusian Life. Venusian life is completely Terran-like. Humans belong to two species (subspecies?): H. sapiens and H. neanderthalis. True, Venusian sapients do not match exactly any Terrestrial groups (e.g. the Nesbergu, Cloud Mountain People, are amber-skinned but yellow hairs and blue eyes are frequent and epicanthic fold as well), but the differences seem well within species level. Lots of mammals are found which are either the verge of being classifiable into terrestrial species (as e.g. tharg » cow, or the local  boar) or could be considered as a new member of a terrestrial genus (greatwolf < Canidae). Birds generally differ more and dinosaurs are still around. As for plants, some are almost terrestrial as well. As for geologic layers, the early layers are lifeless, showing a reducing atmosphere. Then there is a layer, with the estimated interval of 2-3 My, where remnants of bluegreen and red algae are conjectured; and then completely terrestrial-like Jurassic macroscopic fossils follow. Theory: Somebody (nicknamed Lords of Creation) outside of the Solar System terraformed Venus c. 200 My ago. (Mars is suspected also to have been terraformed, but there the layers are not so clear.)

            As for anthropology/linguistics, we have information about 3 different sapient groups. (The neanderthals are clearly at Upper Palaeolithic grade as were c. 35 ky ago the Szeletians, Uluzzians & Castelperronians, but our knowledge is rather sketchy about them.) The leading autochtones are the bronze-age Kartahownians with a more or less Mediterranean skin colouration and with a language with no kin on present Earth. The culture is comparable to terrestrial Bronze Age ones: big social differences, kingship guaranteed by the gods, centralised state. (This automatically comes from physical and astrophysical properties of bronze. Bronze is more reliable, much  better cast than copper &c.; but then tin is a bottleneck. Bronze needs roughly 10 % tin, but for cosmic abundance Sn is two orders of magnitude rarer than Cu [17]. So civilisation exhausts the local thin, and then industry needs long range expeditions and that needs strong organisation in the society. The only terrestrial exception was Andronovo [18]; but they were the first horse nomads, so everybody himself could ride to the Altai. There are no horse nomads on LCTL Venus, not even horses.) Their neighbours are hunter-gatherers with not much organisations, and with a completely different language. Finally, the Nesbergu, the Cloud Mountain People, speaks an Indo-European language, kentum version.

            After collecting the above geological (I should rather write aphroditology, but, alas, in our times the classical culture is withering), biological, anthropological and linguistic information the Jamestown community formulate a theory: c. 200 My ago the Lords of Creation terraformed Venus, and some few million years later they started to transplant animals & plants. This happened in waves, this is the reason for a surprising mixture of clades & grades in the Venusian Regnum Animalia. (In addition, Jamestown seems to believe that Venus is a zoo or park or biological research station for the Lords of Creation.)

            Our information about LCTL Venus does not give details for the transplantation waves, but some deductions are more or less sure. A wave happened in Jurassic, but it did not transplant mammals/therapsids. With such a transplantation now very strange mammals would be present there (or did they die out?). One or a few Cretaceous transplantation was responsible for the diapsids (e.g. dinosaurs), and maybe for some birds. (Venusian birds seem to differ more from terrestrial relatives than mammals do.)

            In the Cenozoic multiple transplantation waves can be conjectured. Greatwolves originally were near to Miocene Epicyon (Feldman). Local boars seem to be near to terrestrial boars; the Suidae exist from cca. the Miocene/Pliocene border. Tharg is a bovine according to Feldman, not exactly an Earth species but something half buffalo half wisent. So the ancestor must have been transplanted in Late Pliocene. Antelopes exist on LCTL Venus, but the Lords of Creation may have found antelopes in any time in Neogene. Finally, let us see Primates. Baboons are mentioned, the group appeared in Pliocene. Then the forrick, something with bright red bottom, living at treetops, so a Macaca or a Cercopithecus or something between. Such animals are common from the Miocene/Pliocene border, but the description is vague enough, so any time can be good in the last 30 My. And we have both types of Homo. Upper Palaeolithe H. neanderthalis could be collected from Hengelo interstadial upwards for cca. 10 millenia; but the Upper Palaeolithe grade could have been reached on Venus as well. Mediterranean-looking H. sapiens is very probably later, but we could not depend too much on specific features because the transplanted groups probably were small and genetic drift may have produced strange things. However Indo-European Nesbergu must be quite recent.

            The language is kentum; however satemisation was an innovation, so in the older times all IE dialects must have shown kentum features. However "9" is "nef", while in Satem Slavic and Baltic (except Westernmost Baltic, Prussian) "9" is formed from another root ("devät'"), so some forking may be found for dating. However the "100" is interesting: "tektek", where "tek" is "10". Now, in lots of IE languages a root related to Latin "kentum", Sanskrit "satem" is used for "100"; "tektek" = "ten tens; big ten" is a quite different construction. Note that words related to "kentum" are known from Finno-Ugric languages ("had", "kant" &c., but often not in meaning "100", but rather as "bigger coherent group". Manyshi "100" is interestingly enough "janigh sat", so "big seven", being "sat" = "7"; the same construction as in Nesbergu "tektek" except that in Manyshi "7" acts as if it played the role of "10"; surely some reminiscence of a 7-based counting system. So the guess is that the "tektek" construction is old amongst IE languages but later than an IE-Uralic language unity/Sprachbund. For more discussion see App. B.

            However no Venusian culture knew the bow, which is a Mesolithic innovation. This would tentatively put the last transfer to c. 8,000 BC or before. So obviously Kartahownians discovered copper smelting and later bronze already on Venus.

            It is impossible to write the prehistory of Venusian H. sapiens from such meager information. However we can write the history of LCTL Earth almost for a quarter century after WWII from the data of [4] & [5]; that will be done in the next Chapter and a picture will emerge.

 

2. ON THE POST-WWII LCTL EARTH

            Explicit statements, hints, logic, and detailed knowledge of the parallel OTL history make it possible to write a chronological table of LCTL between 1945 and 1969. Mentions of earlier events (other than scientific) are extremely rare and this is also true for events between 1970 and 1988.

            WWII was fought, and very probably very similarly to OTL. We shall see the reasons; I must mention the problem explicitly only because one and half sentences in the prologue of [5] seems to contradict this. There, watching the TV program from the landing on Mars, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov discuss the motivation for space research. Heinlein tells: "We had the incentive, once they proved Mars had an oxygen atmosphere back in 'forty-seven'. ... That's why we had von Braun hard at work from the day we caught him, ..." Since in OTL von Braun was working in Peemünde, later Soviet sector, one could interpret the statement in a way that the war ended in LCTL in 1947. However even in OTL von Braun went twice to USA, namely he became PoW in 1945 in Bavaria, then transported to USA; but he went then home in 1947, and returned with his family to USA. Heinlein in [5] may remember this second travel; with a WWII 2 years longer LCTL Japan could not be a WestBlock state in [5].

            There are a few events when we know or at least rather strongly suspect that they happened in LCTL but sources [4] and [5] do not explicitly mention it. In such cases our reconstruction is given in italics and smaller font. If only the date is deduction, I use normal font. Table 1 does not contain scientific events, including space research; such come later.

 

Year

LCTL

OTL

1945

End of WWII

End of WWII

1946

Postwar reorganisations

Postwar reorganisations

1947

Paris peaces. USA-UK Bizonia in Germany

Paris peaces. USA-UK Bizonia in Germany

1948

First Berlin Crisis. First Israeli-Arab War

First Berlin Crisis. First Israeli-Arab War

1949

Popular Republic of China. Republic of China on Taiwan, Qemoy and Matsu. Two German states. Independent states in the late French Indochina. COMECON (Council of Mutual Economic Aid) in East Europe

Popular Republic of China. Republic of China on Taiwan, Qemoy and Matsu. Two German states. Independent states in the late French Indochina. COMECON (Council of Mutual Economic Aid) in East Europe

1950

Korean War

Korean War

1951

Communauté Européenne du Charbon et de l'Acier from 6 states: Luxemburg, Belgium, Netherland, Italy, West Germany & France; from 1957 Communauté Économique Européenne

Communauté Européenne du Charbon et de l'Acier from 6 states: Luxemburg, Belgium, Netherland, Italy, West Germany & France; from 1957 Communauté Économique Européenne

1952

USA H-bomb

USA H-bomb

1953

Korean War ends. Generalissimo Stalin dies; successor Khrushchev

Korean War ends. Generalissimo Stalin dies; successor Khrushchev

1954

First Qemoy-Matsu crisis

Western European Union. First Qemoy-Matsu crisis

1955

?

End of occupations in Austria

1956

First Secretary Mao Tse-Tung dies; successor is Chou En-Lai. Suez Crisis; USA-UK intervention

Suez crisis; British, French & Israeli intervention. Hungarian revolution; Soviet intervention

1957

?

IAEA

1958

Second Qemoy-Matsu crisis. Then peaceful settlement of the dispute bw. PRC/RC. De Gaulle returns to power

No settlement of Qemoy-Matsu dispute PRC/RC. De Gaulle returns to power

1959

?

Khrushchev-Mao negotiations in Beijing

1960

?

EFTA: UK, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Danemark, Sweden. French A-bomb

1961

JFK president

JFK president

1962

Laotian troubles. US troops in Indochina

Laotian troubles. Cuban crisis. Ceasefire in Algeria

1963

?

De Gaulle blocks UK’s way into the European Common Market. Start of Soviet-Chinese crisis. Kennedy is killed; successor Johnson

1964

Kennedy withdraws from Indochina

Khrushchev is ousted; successor Brezhnev & Kosigin

1965

Kennedy president second time

URSS promises "maximal aid" to North Vietnam

1966

Thailand Border Crisis, later settled

France leaves the military branch of NATO

1967

Arab-Israeli 6-Day War; common EastBlock-WestBlock demarche, Nicosia treaty, inter-block peacekeeping

Arab-Israeli 6-Day War; no peacekeeping

1968

The Franco regime falls in Spain; Spain goes into the Communauté Européenne

French, Bohemian and Polish internal crises. New Economic Mechanism in Hungary, effective end of command economy there

1969

?

French President de Gaulle abdicates

           

 

Table 1: World politics 1945 - 1968

 

 

            We do not yet know if de Gaulle abdicated also in LCTL in 1969; the OTL immediately reason had nothing to do with either the EastBlock (Warsaw Pact/COMECOM) or with Space Race. But anyways the Western European history continues to diverge. In OTL the new French President Pompidou had nothing about the membership of UK in Communauté Européenne, UK enters in 1972 and so the Commonwhealth ceases to be a customs community and Australia, New Zealand & Canada starts to gravitate towards USA. In contrast, in LCTL the Commonwealth as a unity merges the space activity with USA's and keeps pound, yard and such.

From this comparative Chronological Table a naive first guess for the effective terrestrial PoD would be the earlier death of Mao and the succession of reformer Chou. However this cannot be true. Note that in 1956 LCTL USA helps UK in the Suez crisis. Now the steps leading to an UK-France-Israel intervention with USA "neutrality" were long and complicated in OTL and Mao was practically negligible in them. So the effective PoD must have been earlier; and Table 2 of the space and astronomy  activities will prove this. Table 2 starts in 1947.

 

Year

LCTL

OTL

1947

Kuiper at McDonald finds O2 in Martian atmosphere

Kuiper at McDonald finds CO2 in Martian atmosphere

1951

First satellite

IAF congress in London about artificial satellites

1956

?

Intercontinental missiles

1957

?

First Soviet satellite

1958

?

First USA satellite

1960

First manned spaceflight (Gagarin). Soviet Pionir-Venus probe

First Transit satellite for navigation

1961

USA & UK space activities merge

First manned spaceflight (Gagarin)

1962

First interplanetary probes with TV: URSS to Venus, USA to Mars

Mariner-2 flyby at Venus. First British satellite Ariel-1. USA & UK space activities start to merge

1964

?

TV from Mars (Mariner-4)

1967

?

Venera-4 enters Venus' atmosphere, but does not reach the surface

1969

?

Manned USA mission to Moon (Apollo-11). Venera-5 lands on Venus

1970

?

Venera-7 lands on Venus and sends back pictures

1978

?

Viking probes on Mars

1981

First EastBlock manned mission to Venus; first WestBlock manned mission to Mars

Voyager TV pictures from the Saturnian system

1982

First WestBlock manned mission to Venus

Joint Soviet-French orbital flight

 

Table 2: Space science events from 1945 till 1982

 

 

Gagarin’s flight must have been first also in LCTL (maybe only in EastBlock?) because EastBlock named a Venusian continent Gagarin. Spaceflights came earlier in LCTL. However I guess the difference cannot be more than 1-2 years, because even in OTL Gagarin was young at his flight.

            We see that space research is accelerated on LCTL; the acceleration must have started at effective PoD. Then the 1947 Kuiper measurement might be the effective PoD; but it is not. For this see Table 3 about atmospheric measurements before WWII. If not explicitly stated, then it is OTL:

 

Year

Measurement

Remark

1645

F. Fontana observes dark spots on Venus

 

1896

P. Lowell observes dark strips on Venus

 

1925

Adams & St. John at Mt. Wilson observe water and oxygen in the Martian atmosphere [19]

 

1932

Adams & Dunham do not find O2 in the Venusian atmosphere but observe CO2 lines [20], [21], [22]

 

1932

Adams & Dunham observe O2 in the Venusian atmosphere [23]

LCTL

1933

Adams & Dunham do not observe oxygen in the Martian atmosphere [24]

 

1933

Adams & Dunham observe oxygen in the Martian atmosphere [25]

LCTL

 

Table 3: Important Venus/Mars observations before WWII

 

 

            The last two mentioned measurements must have happened in 1932-3 in  LCTL even if [5] writes only "in the 1930's" because the opposition before the publication was on Mar. 1, 1933. So in OTL Adams & Dunham performed the measurements, evaluated it, and sent the results to Ap. J., where it appeared at the indicated pages. If their conclusions had been opposite (as it was on LCTL), still the page numbers would have remained the same.

            Note that [20] in OTL gave the raw data. they then were interpreted first in [21], and then, even more explicitly, in [22], with the result that Venus' atmosphere is CO2-dominated. Note that even in 1950 the OTL data [26] were far from the present OTL ones. Surely a similar sequence of interpretations happened in LCTL too, but I cannot guess authors, titles and page numbers years after the effective terrestrial PoD.

 

3. ON TERRAFORMING

            From modern planetological observations we know the main data of OTL Venus, Earth and Mars. Ref. [4] gives some data of LCTL Venus, [5] that of Mars, and LCTL terrestrial history is so near to OTL one that bulk & atmospheric data of Earths on the two TimeLines must be very, very near. The other differences are given in Table 4. (For style I will use Anglo-Saxon units.)

 

Property

Venus, LCTL

Venus, OTL

Earth, LCTL & OTL

Mars, LCTL

Mars, OTL

Rot. Period

-30h 6m

-243d

23h 56m

24h 34m

24h 37m

Av. Temp, F°

75

900

57

39

-50?

Grey Body Temp, F°

126

126

37

-56

-56

Oxygen %

22.7

<0.01

21.0

20.2

<0.1

CO2 %

0.088

95

0.033

0.11

96.5

Pressure, psi

17.7

1330

14.8

10.7

0.11

 

Table 4: Comparison of LCTL and OTL planets

 

            We can deduce something about terraformation 200 My ago from comparing the present data, LCTL and OTL. While Mars deserves a later, detailed, study, still here I will discuss the terraformation of Mars briefly.

            Of course most of the bulk data are the same between the TimeLines; masses &c. were determined 4500 My ago, not 200 My. True, the rotational period differs 3m between TimeLines. However, we do expect small differences. Namely, in OTL Mars tidal friction was absent in the last 200 My, seas being absent. But tidal friction worked on LCTL Mars.

            3 minutes lengthening of the day have happened on Earth in c. 10 My. But on Earth Moon's tides are more than double than Sun's ones. On Mars, the strength of solar tides is c. 1/4 than on Terra. And on LCTL Mars there are seas, but of moderate sizes. So we would expect some minutes as differences.

            OK, but LCTL Mars rotates 3 minutes faster. Good; but terraformation may have decreased the angular inertia of Mars, decreasing the relief via putting water into the basins. Maybe this overshot the subsequent tidal friction; but only if the water was Martian for origin, in layers near to the surface.

Obviously the Lords of Creation wanted fairly terrestrial atmospheres, not irrational if the source of biological species was Terra. The three LCTL atmospheres are still rather similar, except for the densities, and even those are not too different. The differences are within the range of the last 200 My changes on OTL Earth.

            At present we may believe that on Terra the impact of the Lords of Creation was negligible. (Although see Teyud za-Zhalt's idea in Chap. 4 of [5].) Then we can deduce the pre-200 My atmospheres from the present OTL ones.

            OTL Mars has a thin one, mainly CO2. 200 My ago, pre-PoD, it must have been much thicker, a CO2, H2O and N2 one. Namely

            1) CO2 has a molecular weight 44, while N2 has 28 and H2O only 18. So Mars always loses more water than nitrogen, and nitrogen than carbon dioxide.

            2) Being Mars relatively small, the actual atmosphere is not too stationary; outgassing from volcanoes may be dominant. We do not know (according to OTL science; but LCTL one does not seem superior, and the absolute truth is another matter) when the last OTL Martian volcanoes stopped, but our guesses permit to believe that at least the 4 Big Ones around Mons Olympus still were active. Now, volcanic outgassing is mainly CO2 and H2O.

            Surely 200 My ago Martian seas were already dry (more or less), but water must be abundant in the depths of Mars. We can guess a much denser Martian atmosphere 200 My ago. Anders & Owen guessed »2.5 psi. A Martian meteorite tentatively placed to this age contains a carbonated water inclusion. We extrapolate back from present data that this atmosphere was mainly CO2, but together with 10-20 % N2 as well. At present the atmosphere cannot be stationary, but [5] mentions a plant producing atmospheric gases. It is simple enough for oxygen; that you can get from carbon dioxide. As for nitrogen: there is no protein life without nitrogen. You cannot expect too much nitrogen in rocks, so the Lords of Creation must have transported nitrogen from somewhere, somehow, and also must have guaranteed its preservation:

 that is tembst indeed.

            Now, for Venus, LCTL and OTL rotation periods differ very much. Our first guess would be that the Lords of Creation wanted to produce as a terrestrial environment as possible. In that time Earth day was cca. 23 h.

            Tidal amplitude on Venus is roughly as strong as on Earth (no moons of Venus). Seas are slightly more abundant on LCTL Venus than on Earth, but the difference is not enough to explain the present difference in lengths of day. So I must assume that Lords of Creation stopped accelerating the rotation when arriving at a roughly terrestrial but still longer day. They may have done this deliberately as an experiment (effects of a longer day), but maybe they were simply in hurry.

            If you do not like the idea that very powerful aliens as the Lords of Creation acted simply in hurry (which aversion I do not share), then there remains the hypothesis of biological experiment. Now, Klevecz [27] collected data about circadian cell cycles. He was, of course, looking for traces of OTL ancient (so: shorter) periodicities, and, indeed, he found 16, 20 & 23.5 hour ones in Chlamydomonas, and 16, 19 & 21.5 hour ones in Neurospora. However, he found longer period times as well! E.g. he found 29 h periodicity in Neurospora and 28 h in Chlamydomonas & Drosophila melanogaster, as mutations. He believes that new circadian periodicities appear with some "quantized" period times. If he is right, then LCTL organisms can live quite well with a 28-29 h circadian cycle.

            As for the atmospheric composition, no tembst was needed. OTL Venusian atmosphere (so cca. the one at PoD on Venus) has enough nitrogen, if you can do something with the huge amounts of carbon dioxide. If you produce water (rather sparse on Venus, but there the terraforming must have been rather physics than biology), CO2 may be made bound in calcareous minerals. Bluegreen algae (whose traces have been found by Samuel Feldman in layers) can happily convert carbon dioxide into  oxygen.

            Of course, at the beginning after PoD it was necessary to save the algae from the high temperature from the runaway greeenhouse effect. We do not know how this was done. But this is not tembst; this is super physics.

            There is a clear signal that the evolutions of the crusts of OTL & LCTL Venuses began to strongly diverge at the true PoD 200 Mya.

            Ref. [4] mentions a few numbers about the topography of LCTL Venus, in Chap. 1. According to that the land to sea ratio is 20:80; the land is composed of 2 true continents, Gagarin in the Arctic regions and Lobachevsky in the Antarctic ones. These two add up to some 33 million square miles, and the remaining 7 million is mostly chains of islands "ranging in size from tiny atolls to nearly half a million square miles".

            The topography of OTL Venus is different. Of course, we cannot speak about continents, not being seas at all. However, there are highlands, and their surface ratio is roughly the same as that of the continents in LCTL. The biggest highland is equatorial Aphrodite which seems to be represented at most by fragments in LCTL. The second biggest highland is Arctic Ishtar of roughly Australian size. The third is Beta, roughly 2 million sq.m., obviously of volcanic origin as the Terran Hawaii islands. The other highlands are no more than isolated peaks.

            The OTL measurements could not yet give fine enough vertical reliefs to calculate what would be sea level at an LCTL-like water content. Ishtar is much smaller than Gagarin; but who knows what adjacent regions would be land. However the biggest OTL continent is absent, while in OTL we cannot see the substantial LCTL Antarctic Lobachevsky. My guess is that both Aphrodite and Beta is fragmented in LCTL.

            I am going to show that Global Plate Tectonic, anomalous in best case on OTL Venus, was quite normal in LCTL, and this is the reason of the substantial topographic differences. But first note that a polar position is an equilibrium one for a continent. Namely, ascending "currents" of the mantle try to break up low-density continental plates, and if not, then at least push them. Now, the exact pattern comes from instabilities in open system thermodynamics, so we cannot predict it. However, planetary rotation defines the poles. So we expect a continent once around the pole to remain there. On Earth, in OTL our only well-known example, Antarctica seems to sit around the South Pole at least in the last 200 My.

            Terran North Pole was sea/ocean in the last 200 My, but generally there were substantial continents in the neighbourhood; while subtropic/tropic India and Australia travelled a lot. Now, this pattern is not expected on OTL Venus for two reasons.

            First, rotation of OTL Venus is so slow that for first approximation the position of the poles is not felt in the mantle. Second, the crust of OTL Venus is rather thin.

            An analytic toy model demonstrates this. Assume that all rocky planetary bodies are composed of the same materials in the same ratios (probably not true) and they are internally homogeneous (untrue for the larger bodies). You can find the calculations in [28], [29] and [30], even if they are crude approximations. Then one gets for the internal temperature distribution:

              T(r) = (F/6κ)(Q2-r2)                                                                                                               (3.1)

where F is the volume density of heat production from radioactive decay and κ is the heat conduction coefficient.

            Now, we can measure the surface temperature, and in Earth, the thickness of the crust, so the average depth of the Moho discontinuity, which is given as 21 miles in Earth. We may assume that the primary reason of this discontinuity is a temperature, where the rigid crustal rocks become too plastic. Thence we get:

              Dcr,V » (Tm-Ts,V)(Tm-Ts,E)-1RERV-1Dcr,E                                                                       (3.2)

            Terrestrial interior models yield T»1450 F° at Moho. Substituting all these into the above equation we get that the thickness of crust is very similar on Earth and LCTL Venus, while the Moho discontinuity may be as near to surface as 2.5 miles on OTL Venus. So on OTL Venus plates may exist, they may move, but they are not too rigid. In contrast, in LCTL plates can move, merge or break up essentially in the same way as on Earth.

            It is worthwhile to note finally that between Venus and Terra there are two interesting but rather unexplained resonances.

            The first may be harmless enough: 8 terrestrial years are equal to 13.004 Venus years. The "ratio of small integers" is maybe "too good to be accidental", but maybe it is accidental, and if not, the cause may be hidden among the unknown details of planetogenesis 4550 My ago. The resonance is the same in LCTL.

            However the very good resonance of OTL Venusian & Terran years and the Venusian day seems hopeless to be explained. First, let us emphasize, that the retrograde 243 day rotation period of Venus is unexplained. The expectation for centuries was either cca. 24 h (as for Earth & Mars, but see also the 10-hour period of the giant planets as well), or cca. 225 day direct because of the solar tides. The -243 day period is quite arbitrary.

            However, anything be the cause, now between 2 Venus-Terra opposition there is 5.002 Venusian days, so even if the clouds had not obscured totally the surface patterns we would have believed in frozen rotation. We (in OTL) have no idea at all what could have produced this resonance; and we do not have too much reason to believe that the length of the Venusian day remained constant in 4.55 Gy. Might Teyud za-Zhalt be on a good track in Chap. 4 of [5]?

 

4. DISCUSSION

            Table 4 shows a clear terrestrial difference between LCTL & OTL in 1932: the detectation of Venusian atmosphere. This would be the ideal effective, terrestrial, PoD. However we have to check this suggestion, from both directions.

            If not the terraforming of Venus & Mars, the stealing of humans to populate them might influence Terrestrial history. We have told arguments that the influence might have been small and transient; and it indeed was. Until mid-50's the actors of Big Politics are the same in LCTL & OTL: Stalin of the Soviet Union, Mao of China, later de Gaulle of France and Kennedy of USA. Stalin, Khrushchev & Mao were born before 1900, de Gaulle at the early 1900's and Kennedy in the 30's. So History does not change until mid-50's including the names of the actors, so the effective PoD could not push back into the 1800's.

            My suggestion for the effective, terrestrial, PoD is 1932, the Adams & Dunham observation for the Venusian atmosphere (Table 3). However, to accept the suggestion, one should first investigate some critical points, as:

            1) LCTL Venus might have shown some pictures in visible light different from OTL Venus between antiquity and 1932, so influencing History.

            2) The 1925 Adams & St. John Mars observation (Table 3) is against post-Mariner-4 Mars.

            3) How can political history & WWII be similar in LCTL & OTL after 1932 if that is effective terrestrial PoD?

            Let us go step by step. In antiquity lots of cultures identified Venus with the Goddess of Love & Beauty (Sumerian Innin, Akkadian Ishtar, Greek Aphrodite, Roman Venus), obviously for her brightness & brilliance. Different LCTL optical image would have disturbed away LCTL & OTL histories; there was 4000 years for this. So LCTL Venus (about whose optical appearance on the terrestrial sky is not referred in [4]) must have also high albedo and more or less continuous clouds.

            Indeed, LCTL albedo is high, according to temperatures reported from the Venusian surface. LCTL Venus is some 50 F° cooler than she would be without atmosphere (Table 4). Since its CO2 content is some 1.5 times higher than that of Earth, we would expect a strong greenhouse effect, not the opposite. So surely a reflective cloud layer is present, even if we are not informed about the details.

            However [4] mentions that stars are sometimes seen from the surface of LCTL Venus; Teesa, Shamaness of the Nesbergu, knows them even if she is not too interested in them. But this does not contradict the high albedo. OTL handbooks give various albedos between 0.59 & 0.80 (which variance is somewhat surprising); but even with the highest value one-fifth of the light enters the layers below the reflective clouds and may reach the surface (surely, blurred). The details would depend on the LCTL atmospheric conditions, about which [4] gives little information.

            But telescopic observations were commonplace after Galileo. In an atmosphere not much denser than that of Earth, the reflective layer cannot be so uniform as in OTL, and therefore dark spots are sometimes seen.

            OK, but dark spots were sometimes reported; see Table 3. Now we in OTL believe that these observations were optical illusions; but the impact on history does not depend on the objective value of observations.

            Also, from XVIIIth century AD two kinds of observations showed substantial atmosphere: the "horns" and the ring around the disc of Venus when passing before Sun. The horns, clearly a consequence of refraction in Venusian atmosphere, were reported and explained by Schröter in 1792, but with no attempt to calculate atmospheric density. For the ring or Black Drop Easterners refer Lomonosov from the 1761 event and Westerners Captain Cook from the next, 1769 one [31].

            Easterners remember the Soviet national sport to antedate any Western discovery. A Hungarian book from 1958 reproduces "Lomonosov's original" figures, surprisingly enough, labelled with Latin letters. As for Captain Cook, he writes about a ring and the problems the ring caused to determine the exact moment of inner contact, but othervise the report is vague enough and Captain Cook did not try to calculate a density.

            Anyway, in these observations the refraction above the reflecting clouds was seen. In OTL that is 40 miles above the surface and higher; there the pressure is well below 1 terrestrial atmosphere. And even in OTL 1960 Vaucouleurs & Menzel, observing Regulus' occultation and then extrapolating to the surface, got a mere 1.6-2.8 atmosphere for the surface pressure. So observations in visible light would not have made a clear difference between LCTL & OTL Venuses prior 1932. For more detailed but somewhat looser arguments see App. C.

            For Point 2) we note that quite a few OTL observations suggested more or less Earth-like Mars before 1933 (one of them is [16] from 1925). This point will be relegated to a later study; but the fact, anything be the explanation, means that pre-1932 observations were unable to distinguish between LCTL & OTL Marses. See also App. D.

            For Point 3) we note that [4] and [5] are rather tacit about History between 1932 and 1945. But obviously 2 Big Powers need detailed discussion: Germany & USA.

            Now, at the Adams & Dunham observation Germany was occupied with the problems of the Great Depression and internal struggles caused by it. Next year Hitler became Chancellor, and politics was no more governed by rationality.

            The situation was different in USA. However first, Roosevelt taking Presidency in 1933, a reconstruction of society was needed. So Surely LCTL Roosevelt declared also a terrestrial New Frontier. Then until Pearl Harbour the USA was rather isolacionist, and in 1942 it reacted to the aggression automatically, without any consideration for long-range plans of spaceflight.

            As if the URSS, first she was quite full with mere terrestrial goals as taking away the lands from the farmers or home class struggles and forced industrialisation. True, Alexei Tolstoi had already written the novel Aelita, where a Soviet spaceman lands on Mars, has a romance, and parallelly leads a revolution of local workers against the privilegized. I think, the novel had its impact from LCTL 1947, when in LCTL URSS space activity went up too, keeping step by step with USA.

            In LCTL Kuiper confirms the 1932-33 observations in 1947 and Cold War goes gradually into Space. Earth herself will be somewhat more peaceful from mid-50's. I wonder if this has any effect on Mao's early death in LCTL; but surely, Chou & Chang there settle the second Qemoy-Matsu Crisis peacefully, while in OTL the Qemoy-Matsu Problem was active till '88 and is theoretically such even now.

            I am sad that the only definite LCTL remark about Hungary in [4] is the accented voice (in Russian) of a Hungarian  duty officer from Cosmograd. It would have been so in OTL too, except that there was not too much joint space activity on East. Namely, Hungarians speak any other language with heavy accent, because of the special Hungarian grammar strongly influencing Hungarian speech acoustics [32]. Maybe Finnish & Turkish would be exceptions; but practically no Hungarian speaks Finnish or Turkish.

 

 

APPENDIX A: CHAOS, BUTTERFLIES AND AH

            The recurrent problem of Alternate Histories is: how similar is the history on an ATL compared to the history on OTL after PoD. We cannot be sure, being the discipline of Alternate Histories is completely without an experimental basis. Still, Theory tells us something.

            Some people argues that History has a big enough inertia. This point was somewhat discussed by Poul Anderson (physicist) and Isaac Asimov (biochemist). The argumentation goes in the way: if I eliminated one of the tenth degree ancestors of Lincoln (their number is <1024 because of inbreeding usual in traditional communities, but not for order of magnitude), it would have been substituted by another member of the small local community. While 0.1 % of the genome may have been altered, the alternate ancestor may have been quite similar (see again inbreeding). So: not a big difference.

            But, again: the birth of a specific individual depends not only on the persons of mother and father. OK, within 28 days, the mother donates the same ovum. But for the paternal sperm minutes may count, so some night disturbance may lead to a somewhat different offspring. So in these years the alternate view is much more fashionable, telling that in complicated systems Chaos is inherent: if a butterfly is moving its wings in China, some months later there will be a tornado in Kansas which would not have occurred otherwise.

            As for History, Truth is somewhere between; but we do not know, where. However I can mention examples/analogies.

            Imagine a set of variables x = {x,y,...}, with evolution equations

              dx/dt = Dx(x,y,...)

              ...

where Dx(x) are some differential or integro-differential equations of finite and moderate ranks. This system of equations may be chaotic, as the differential equations of celestial mechanics (not beyond Rank 2) indeed are, and in the Asteroid Belt somewhere the horizon is not farther than 10,000 years. However, if the equations have a First Integral, as e.g. total energy, total angular momentum or such, that quantity is not chaotic; it is a constant.

            So if T is a time horizon, that does not mean that everything will be quite unpredictable beyond T. Some characteristics will be, some will not. It is true that after PoD in general the difference in lots of characters will grow as

            Δi~ eaitdi

where the d's are the (quantum?) jumps at PoD but the ai's may be almost anything. Some are negatuive (“convergence”), but some are positive, so histories start to diverge in those characters.

            Now let us try to apply this on The Sky People [4]. Lords of Creation terraformed Venus in Triassic. This would not influence Earth at all if the astronomical picture of Venus on Earth's sky do not change. Sure, it would have changed if the albedo had changed; but a big change of the albedo would have made impossible to get viable temperatures with the rather high 0.088 % CO2 content anyways.

 

APPENDIX B: NESBERGU, INDO-EUROPEAN LINGUISTICS & MESOLITHIC INNOVATIONS

            Well, the Lords of Creation stole some animals as well. But I am not sure that a few Bovidae or proto-Sus really influenced us.

            The story becomes more sensitive with Homo sapiens. In LCTL Lords of Creation captured and exported a bunch of palaeo-Kartahownians, and that bunch remained on Earth in OTL. So their genetic inheritance is a difference between LCTL & OTL.

            However, note that LCTL modern linguists are unable to find Terrestrial kins of the Kartahownian language. So it is quite possible that the transplanted group was not too successful in OTL, so their influence on us was extremely minor. This could be proven for language, and could not for other characters; but even this is something.

            The argumentation at the end of App. A would not hold automatically for the Nesbergu. They are Indo-Europeans, so their near relatives have quite an influence on XXth century Earth; both LCTL and OTL. However, both from the language and for the appearance of Nesbergu the ancestors seem to have been a peripheral small group. I would dare say, at the very fringe of IE world. While the old IE people may have been diverse for physical anthropology, amber skin with blond hairs is a special combination, and the complete disappearance of the [t] sound as second consonant in "father" shows an outlying group as well. (A descendant of a t-sound can be found here even in Tokharian.)

            Ref. [4] gives a few words: the construction of the tribal name Nesbergu, two similar collective names, a few numerals, 2 kinship names + "Sky". We cannot work from anything else, so let us start.

            Linguist Blair becomes conspicious when hearing the tribal names Nesbergu = Cloud Mountain People, Wergu = beastpeople (neanderthals), Firigu = True People. Why?

            It is an OTL linguist story, how Ventris & Chadwick decyphered Mycenaean tablets. (It is so early in the 50's that I think LCTL linguists also tell the story.) They had no reason to believe that the text was Greek; however some pattern agreed; they tried with the work hypotheses and they became able to red more and more texts.

            Now translations were given by the two people having made bilingual by an artifact of the Lords of the Creation, but remaining quite innocent of Indo-European linguistics. So the 3 meanings were yielded to linguist Blair. But then very probably:

gu = people, humans

and

wer = beast-, feral, animal or something such

firi = real, true

Nesber = Cloud Mountain, Misty Hill

            Now, each European linguist learns some Gothic, that being the oldest German language with substantial records, from IVth c. AD.

            Now, in Gothic human, man = guma and hill, mountain = bairga, where "ai" is probably a monophtong, maybe [ä]. It seems it has come from PIE *bheregh = high, mountain. Then the remaining is "cloud". In Gothic it is not too similar, having no "s" and containing another consonant in the middle; e.g. "Nebel" in High German, "nebula" in Latin or "νεφελος" in Greek (where the "s" is not in the root); but you can turn to Old Church Slavonic. There (and in some other IE languages as well) via an interesting but understandable shift the root is applied to Sky, Heaven; and it has a shorter root for Vocative & Nominative, and a longer one for the other cases. The longer root is: nebeso-.

            Therefore if the Nesbergu came from somewhere the neighbourhood of the Urheimat of Goths + if the words shortened much then the expression is IE.

            But then Wer and Firi should have too IE etymologies. However they may have.

            As it is well known,

PIE ghwer- = Lat. ferus = Cymr. gwyllt = Engl. feral, wild, beast

Now let us see a parallel example:

PIE gwiwos = Lat. vivus, Osc. bivus = Engl. quick

and

Lat. vivere = Cymr. byw

Lat. viridis = Cymr. gwyrrd = Engl. green

So the pattern is: PIE initial gw- is continued in Celtic gw-, but in Latin v- and Oscan/Umbrian b-. However we are interested now not in gw-, but in ghw-. Let us do it with some caution:

PIE ghwer- = Lat. ferus = Cymr. gwyllt = Engl. wild = Nesb. wer-

As for Firi, I cannot be sure, but I suggest the Italo-Celtic - Nesbergu etymology

Lat. verus (adj.) = Cymr. gwir (= Engl. true) = Nesb. firi

to the parallel of viridis & vivus. Then we are ready with the collective names; Nesbergu might indeed be Indo-European.

            If we want to go back fully to PIU unity, Wergu is wer- + gu- < ghwer- + dhghomyo-, which now will be written into the more unequivocal orthography ghwer- + dhghomyo-. The root dhghomyo- in itself is a derivation from dhghem- = "earth". So dhghomyo = earthling, mortal. This paraphrasis acted as the common plural of wiro- & gwena, as people is the common plural of man & woman. So both Lat. homo and Goth guma is a regular descendant.

            It seems that proto-IE was not easy to speak rapidly. Of course, native speakers of languages less sonorant than English, Italian or Polynesian still speak their languages without any problem; they learn it in infancy. E.g. Slovakian has words without even a single vowel; but then they must contain "at least" an -r- or -l-. It is easy to pronounce them after a few hours of practicising; I have learnt it although my pronunciation may be awkward for a Slovakian. But dhghomyo starts with two aspirated stops next to each other. I could not form two stops without a vowel between.

            Maybe dh and gh were not exactly stops (although IE linguists generally speak about the threefold representation of stops as e.g. {d,dh,t}. You may try with dh as the English sound in then; and gh as the sound was pronunciated some 800 years ago in enough. But even then dhghomyo would not be easy to enunciate.

            Surely facultative murmured half-vowels, impossible to reconstruct, were used. But even then, with such consonant-rich vocabulary surely speech was slower and more deliberate. In all branches of IE consonant clusters are continuously simplifying in the age of records, more than 2000 years for Romance languages. Surely this happened in the previous 2 millennia as well, with the result that dhghomyo became homo in the Latin and guma in the Gothic. So Gwerdhghomyo > Wergu in Nesbergu; and now I had demonstrated why I think it is better not to demonstrate with the reconstructed PIE form of the Nesbergu compound Nesbergu.

            The next step will be the check with the words "mother", "father" and "sky". Unfortunately, "mother" and "father" came into IE originally to baby talk. "Mother" is "ma", and it is absolutely unusable, as Lieutenant Vitrac stated it. The "father" word, at least, shows regular sound shifts within IE. The reconstructed form is *pVter, where V is either the neutral vowel swa indogermanicum, or h2, a laryngeal. Some reflexes are:

Sanskr. pitar, Gr. πατηρ, Lat. pater, Osc. patír, Tokh. pacar (c=t'), Goth. fadar, OIr athir, Arm. hair; Nesb. piwar

            As for sky, we saw above that some IE subgroups called the sky "Cloudy". But not all; and even if they did it, they kept the root "(Clear/Sunny) Sky" for related ideas as "day" or "god". So:

PIE *Dyeus" ~ OLat. Diovis = Osc. Iuves = Gr. Ζευς/Διος = Hit. Sius ~ Sanskr. dyaus ~ OIr deib (the -s's do not belong to the root); Nesb. taiz

            The etymologies are satisfactory, so Nesbergu indeed seems IE. Still, the most outlying IE language (loss of the t-sound in piwar and loss of the -u- in taiz). For such a strong divergent evolution either a peripheric position or a long separation time is needed. In any case, the neighbourhood of Goths, existing a mere 2000 years ago well within the Germanic sphere is clearly not enough. So othic may have yielded the IE idea, but for more specific details it cannot be else than a will-o'-the wisp. Let us continue the discussion methodically.

            Now, it is not easy to decide the chronology of the transplantation of Nesbergu from OTL data; I think in LCTL linguists using the seminal works of Ch. Blair about the Nesbergu language are ahead of us in constructing IE language trees. My poor best trial goes as follows.

            In LCTL 1989 Nesbergu were just at the border of Neolithic, but without bow & arrow. The language is definitely Indo-European or something very near to it (it is a matter of definition, what is exactly Indo-European, see the Indo-Hittite school), definitely kentum subgroup. As for physical anthropology, their skins are not too depigmented ("amber-skinned"), but hairs are often blond and eyes blue, and tilted. A Russian technician in the Prologue of [4], watching the first TV pictures from Venus showing the flight of Deera, Shamaness of Nesbergu believes that such people are strange but they might live in the Urals. What can we get from these data?

            Physical anthropology points towards "Northeast" from European viewpoint, or to an acquisition from a tribe of dual origin, one Eastern & moderately pigmented, one Northern and depigmented and then genetic drift because of the small number of the transplanted. (Also, the tribe should have been rather peripherial in the IE community, because the event did not influence History.)

            This is the proper time to compare the Nesbergu cardinal numbers to various other IE ones. We know them up to 10; but number "1" was very often originally a demonstrative pronoun and approaching 10 various peculiarities may appear. So, there came the cardinals between 2 & 6:

 

N°

PIE

Nesb.

Latin

Goth.

Sanskr.

Lith.

Arm.

Hittite

-

Recon.

?

kentum

kentum

satem

satem

?

kentum

2

duwo

tah

duo

twai

duvan

Du

erk'u

da-

3

treyes

tro

tres

threis

trayas

trys

erekh

tri-

4

qwetwores

keti

quattuor

fidwor

catvaras

keturi

chorkh

meui-

5

penkwe

pekki

quinque

finf

panca

penki

hing

panku*

6

sweks

sews

sex

saiks

shash

šeši

vech

?

 

*: 5 is Lycian

 

 

Table 6: IE cardinal numbers from 2 to 6

 

 

            Nesbergu cardinals, albeit exotic, seem more conservative than the Armenian ones, and observe also the strange Hittite "4". So the IE origin is indeed probable; but the peculiarities cannot be explained until the time and place of acquisition will have been successfully discussed. Because we cannot know the time of the next information about LCTL Venus, I continue with the discussion of possibilities.

            Now, in recent OTL years there are two great schools about IE protohistory & dispersal, and combinations of them. We may call one of the school "the traditional linguistic" one, and the other "origin from Anatolian agriculturalists".

            Obviously in all extant of well documented IE languages Hittite is most peculiar and also have the oldest records. Now, the first school tells that Hittites (and close kins) were the first group leaving the area of IE unity (already showing some strong dialectal differences) and making a long trek to Anatolia. Then looking for IE words for archaeologically datable innovations as horses, wagons, wheels, sheep, grains, metals and such the result is that the only metal with common IE word is copper; horses were domesticated but there is no consensus about wagons and "wheel-words"; agriculture is fully Neolithic, but not too sophisticated. Since horse domestication started somewhere on the eastern side of Dnieper about 4400 BC, this puts the IE Urheimat somewhere North of the Black Sea. Closer to the Fertile Crescent agriculture would have been more sophisticated and in general innovations would have come earlier. The most popular Urheimat is the steppe from the Dnieper to Western Kazakistan. The Hittete trek then must have started between 4400 BC and the beginning of Bronze Age, which we may put to c. 3000 BC. The consensus date is 4000 BC. In this scenario we could try with a peripherial tribe near to Southern Urals, deeply in IE unity, say, before horses.

            The Anatolian school, however, uses longer IE chronologies. The idea is that the proto-IE population was the primordial agriculturalists of Anatolia (quite old, before 6000 BC); then, say at 4500 BC some IE people crossed the Caucasus and went to the steppe. The Anatolians later crossed the Dardanelles too, going to the Balkans. This scheme has no problem with archaeologic data but is not overly popular within linguists; obviously it puts back the clock with 2 millennia, except if we redefine the linguistic group. E.g. we may construct a superfamily Indo-Hittite, with two sister families Indo-European & Anatolian. Then the Indo-European unity is 4500 BC on the steppe without Anatolians.

            In OTL results of checking the alternative scenarios are still equivocal. A very detailed and heavily mathematised article [33] got the end of linguistic unity between 5800 & 7800 BC. This supports the Anatolian scenario; however there are problems. On one hand, Hittites were definitely newcomers just after 2000 BC at the center of the later Hittite Empire where their predecessors were the quite unrelated Hattic people. So Anatolian languages could not dominate Anatolia before 2000 BC. On the other, the best calculated language tree gives separation of the Greek branch at c. 5100 BC.

            Now the traditional linguistic school made a lot of work about linguistic innovations within IE. There are lots of sound shifts, changes in conjugations & declensions &c. established even if the time data are rather vague in linguistics itself. A recent paper [34] tried to reconstruct the proto-Greek stage and concluded that there is practically no time range for it. Without going into unnecessary details, the essence of the arguments is as follows.

            Proto-Greek is/was the language which i) already differed from NIE (Nuclear IE, i.e. IE - Hittite) and ii) was the common ancestor of all later Greek dialects. Now, proto-Greeks arrive at Greece in 1900 BC (archaeologic consensus) and Mycaenean records start in 1400 BC. However Mycaenean is not the proto-Greek language; it is only a Greek dialect, first millennium records show quite different characteristics, so proto-Greek must have been spoken before 1500 BC, maybe in the "Greek Urheimat".

            But when trying to reconstruct a stage which would have been the common ancestor of all Greek dialects, it is almost NIE, with minimal differences in declension and with still ongoing phonologic changes. In these characters proto-Greek is still a NIE dialect. the only definite difference is in the vocabulary: lots of words learnt from the autochtones in Greece. This is clearly against the separate life of proto-Greek from 5100 BC.

            Here we are, in OTL 2008. In LCTL the inclusion of Nesbergu into the trees surely helped a lot; but that information being unavailable here I continue as I can. In the Anatolian scenario Nesbergu were picked i) from Anatolia before 5800 BC (the time is taken from [33]), or ii) from the steppe much later, say just before 4400 BC (horse domestication) because some time was needed to deviate so much from the other IE languages, to mix with Easterners &c. And here we can use the lack of bow & arrow. Anatolia before 6200 would be good for a still non-Neolithic stage; but Nesbergu physical anthropology is incompatible with Anatolian origin. The steppe about 5000 BC would be good, except that i) an already Neolithic stage would be expected; ii) even if not, the tribe must  have been well into Mesolithic, and Nesbergus did not know bows and arrows. So it seems that the Nesbergu data are incompatible with the Anatolian scenario.

            In the alternative scenario i) we must think in a tribe on the Northeast of the Pontic IE Urheimat; ii) the acquisition time should be before 4400 BC because otherwise the transplanted Nesbergu would have domesticated churr on Venus; iii) and the time is better to put back even more because there were no bows & arrows.

            As for the time range, Mesolithe came with the neothermal climate. With the global warming coming in 9700 BC the great herbivores (reindeer, wisent, mammoth &c. either went to North, or at least definitely changed habits. So the Magdalenian economy based on specialised hunting broke down; the new lifestyle is the Mesolithic one, Maglemosian first on the Northern Plains/around North Sea, with diversified, smaller prey. So you cannot expect tribes without Mesolithic innovations after 9000 BC, or maybe after 8000 BC at very peripheric/isolated locations.

            We are 4 millennia before the end of IE unity. Could a language be IE/PIE in 8000 BC? Well, there is an OTL book [35] reconstructing the linguistic history as follows. Until c. 13,000 BC there was in Eurasia a unique linguistic superfamily Vasco-Dene or Greater Dene-Caucasian or you may it call as you want (Ice Age hunters are mobile enough) ; of course with some serious differences at huge distances. Then first came the Natufian culture in the Fertile Crescent and soon the Global Warming.

            Natufian invented the harvesting society, and after Global Warming Northerners the Mesolithic life. Population density increased for the inventive people. So a small community “just South of the Caucasus” so not too far from the Fertile Crescent multiplied and multiplied, its pecularities became the characteristic innovations of a smaller new superfamily; and this was Nostratic. Later there came Neolithic, and the speakers of the dialects Uralic, Chukch-Kamchatkan and Esquimaux-Aleut did not give appropriate reactions. (Of course the theory was made by IE scholars.) So they remained small, Indo-Europeans grew. And you see the result.

I am not fanatic about this theory (of course). Still the story demonstrates that there might have been a few millennia of slow proto-IE spread before 4400 BC.

And finally, why not between 13,000 & 8,000? Let us consult with Table 7, which is now again the cardinals, but in a Nostratic context:

 

Number

Nesb.

PIE

Etrusc.

PFU

Magyar

Nenets

Old Turk.

-

IE?

Reconst.

?

Reconst.

FU/Uralic

Uralic

Altaic

2

tah

duwo

zal

Kakte

két

s'id'a

iki

3

tro

treyes

ci

Kolm

három

n'axar?*

üch

4

keti

qwetwores

huth

Neljä

négy

t'et

tört

5

pekki

penkwe

mach

Vitte

öt

saml'angg

besh

6

sews

sweks

sa

Kutte

hat

mat?

altı

 

*: ? here is a glottal stop

 

Table 7: Nostratic cardinals

 

            Apart from Etruscan, whose position is doubtful, everybody agrees that the nearest Nostratic neighbours of Indo-European are Uralic and Altaic; and Uralic & Altaic are so close to each other that FU Magyar can import any number of Turkish words without grammatical problems (this was definitely done between c. 550 and 850 AD).

            Still, no similarity between PIE & PFU cardinals. There is also no similarity between Old Turkish and PFU (or Magyar) cardinals. And there is also no similarity between Uralic PFU and Uralic Nenets! While nebula ~ Mongolian neghü ~ Proto-Tunguz nibup ~ Old Japanese nipop ~ Western Canadian Inupik nuvija. Berg ~ Altaic *bioro ~ Samoyed pir. Ferus ~ Proto-Altaic gúri ~ Proto-Uralic kojra. Quite possible etymologies throughout Nostratic; some vocabulary even claims that the Modern Magyar variant of PIE g’hwer- is here, in elegant Latin testis. True, if a mammal has testes, he is generally wilder, even if not feral. Fundamental words survived the separation of PIE from amongst Nostratic, why not the cardinal numbers?

            But this just means that cardinals are more sensitive. A possible reason may be that the system of counting words (which were, anyway, high tech for specialists first) had been built up/rearranged/specialised in Mesolithic, independently in the individual families. Indeed, "9" is even now not unique in the IE family, the reconstruction of cardinals has not yet been successful above 6 in the Finno-Ugric subfamily of the Uralic family, and for the whole family the reconstruction of a unique counting set of any size seems hopeless.

            But Nesbergu is clearly a member of the IE system. As for Etruscan, there is no consensus.

 

APPENDIX C: FRAGMENTS FROM THE HISTORY OF PRE-MARINER & PRE-VENERA OBSERVATIONS OF VENUS IN OTL

            The aim of this Appendix is to demonstrate that OTL astronomy until the probe Mariner-2 in 1962 had a wide variety of opinia about Venusian atmosphere, rotation & temperature; even after the results of Adams & Dunham's 1932 observations. Then, to help LCTL statements, we must utilize a somewhat inverse argumentation, as follows.

            If in OTL, where Venus is not terraformed, and its disc in visible light is unblemished white, lots of honest reports mentioned dark spots, mountains &c., then in LCTL where the disc still is unblemished white, but not everywhere in every moment, some telescopic observations may have showed real topography; still the only difference between OTL and LCTL peoples (until cca. Kuiper, 1947) was that in OTL the topographic observations were incorrect while in LCTL they were correct. So surely until WWII the layman population, politicians, first secretaries, warlords &c. may have reacted rather similarly on the two TimeLines.

            For practical reasons I will make the argumentation in 2 steps: from Galileo to 1959, and from 1959 to 1962. The Mariner-2 flyby happened on Dec. 14, 1962, and afterwards there was no place for habitable Venus in OTL.

            I belonged to EastBlock, so we were at some distance from information (both Western and Eastern). Therefore my synchronous information was generally second or third hand; and after Mariner-2 everybody soon forgot the earlier observations for habitable OTL Venus. Therefore lots of efforts would be necessary for me to trace back the original references. So I will not do it; if someone is really interested, the names and years I give may be enough for him. There is a work of F Suppe on Internet which might be useful, but that author forbids the citation of the Internet version in a statement, so, while I regret it, I of course will not cite the work.

 

Till 1959

            1) Atmosphere.

            Two questions were very important: Was there oxygen? and Was there water?

            Finding the oxygen needed spectroscopy so that rather belonged to XXth century. As for water refraction &c. might have been enough.

            Bianchini in 1726 drew a map with oceans & continents. In 1874 Tacchini & Ricco saw water vapour. Then came Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius, who wrote in 1918 the book "The Destiny of Stars", where he visualised Venus as a very warm and very humid world.

            Here I stop a moment. Arrhenius was indeed a Nobel laureate; he got the prize in 1903; and he was a scientist. But he got the prize for Chemistry, so he was not the best source to tell: what is indeed on Venus. If, however, there is water, then the remainder indeed is the domain of a chemist.

            So Arrhenius' Venus was warm & humid. For this reason he doubted the presence of higher animals; his Venus was the world of jungles. Higher animals will come later after cooling down.

            Later some very reliable astronomers (as e.g. Dollfus) reported the observation of something which seemed to be water (vapour or droplets); and the similarly reliable cosmochemist Urey in 1956 interprets Dollfus positively.

            In 1955 Whipple & Menzel guessed that the Venusian oceans would be carbonated water or something similar. And in 1959 Ross & Moore detected above the Venusian cloud layer water vapour from a high balloon; more than in comparable Terrestrial heights.

            Wildt suggested that the clouds were of formaldehyde drops.

 

            2) Rotation

            For a long time the determination of rotation tried to utilize topographic marks believed to be real. Rotation has 3 fundamental characteristics: period time, tilt and chirality (direct vs. retrograde).

            As for period time, results can be classified as i) 225 days (so frozen via tides); ii) cca. 1 days; iii) something between. There was no clear evolution; in any time any of the three opinia was held by somebody. E.g. Schiaparelli & Lowell observed synchronous rotation, while Cassini, Schröter, DeVico & Belopolski measured some period near to 24 hours; Schröter being the most ambitious with some 23h 21m 8s in 1811.

            However Bianchini measured 24.3 days, Pickering 2.8 days, and Steavenson 8 days.

            As for observations of spots, Fontana observed them. and Lowell saw dark lines. Fontana in 1643 observed the terminator jagged, a signal for mountains, and, as I told above, Bianchini was able to draw a map. In the middle of the XIXth century several observers reported peaks.

            Some white spots similar to polar caps were (and are) seen. If it is indeed a polar cap, then we know the axial tilt. Lots of suggestions/determinations of the tilt were published, as e.g. Shröter saw 15°, Pickering 5°, Kuiper 32°, and so on.

            And everybody expected direct rotation (why not?) and did not see anything strongly contradicting it.

 

            3) Temperature

            Almost everywhere believed in a hot Venus, of course. E.g. Fontenelle in the XVIIIth century characterizes the Venusians by telling that the Granadan Moors would be as cold compared to the Venusians as the Greenland Esquimaux or the Lapps to “us”. Arrhenius guessed 117 F° for average temperature. At the beginning of the 1950's a guess was 140 F° at the day hemisphere and -10 F° on the night one.

            Then already the temperature at the top of the cloud layer had been quite directly measured as something -40 F°. However that datum told not too much about the surface.

 

Between 1959 and the Mariner-2

            Observation technique improved very much in the last years of Earth-based aphroditology. Some of my sources need an explanation. Between 1957 and 1988 a book was published in Hungary in each month, mainly for engineers and people interested in such topics, but there were also scientific topics discussed, and space research was frequent in them. The aim was clear. The new generation of Hungarians was weak in languages: Western languages were taught not fanatically while almost nobody made any effort to learn Russian. But, even apart from language ability, State did not like Western journals in Hungary, so they "regulated" the availability. However there was need to know new techniques.

            So some politically reliable old engineers founded the series called "Univerzum Könyvek" (Universe Books), to transfer Knowledge. The series referred the international literature at high popularizing level (as e.g. National Geographic), but frequently not as a direct translation, but somewhat stylized (especially if the source was Western and contained some sensitive point). It never gave exact bibliographic data of the references in the original source. And so on.

            Now, in the time range of this Subchapter the series published 3 articles about Venus: in April 1960, April 1961 and July 1962. The first one was a compilation of the Editors "after Science News", the second also a compilation after Soviet sources, and the third was originally published in the Soviet journal "Priroda" by D. I. Martinov. It will be sufficient to discuss only the first as the beginning of the time range and the third, as the end of it: in 5 more months the Mariner-2 flyby happened.

            The first article obviously represented a minority opinion at the end of 1959; but obviously not an absurd one. I am unable to trace back  the original author, but obviously he was somehow connected to Firsoff. The important statements (sometimes with complicated and very optimistic argumentation) are as:

            Temperature at the cloud layer is -38 F°.

            Chamberlain & Kuiper determined the average temperature of the carbon dioxide as 54±9 F°.

            Houtgast in 1953 detected that Earth gets less solar wind when Venus is between. So Venus must have a strong magnetic field; at least 5 times of terrestrial strength.

            And the clouds reflect a lot of incoming solar radiation; at the final count the average temperature at the surface may be so low as 64 F°.

            This is very similar to LCTL Venus, altough slightly cooler. There is no O2 reported: but even it might occur somehow below the clouds. Therefore an LCTL Venus might have been still consistent (even if not probable) with OTL observations in 1959.

            Everything is different in 1962: rotation is probably retrograde, the period is cca. 10 days, the surface is "moderately hot": 175-210 F°. Observe: even this is not the Venus of Mariner-2. That will be (250-300) days retrograde rotation and cca. 900 F°.

 

APPENDIX D: WHY NOT 1922?

            There is a concurrent candidate for the effective, terrestrial, PoD: 1922, when in OTL St. John & Nicholson were unable to detect oxygen and water in the Venusian atmosphere [36].

            The principle of the measurement was sound, and as far as we now (in OTL) know the astronomers were right. If you observe the reflected light of a planet, the rays start from Sun, transverse twice the planetary atmosphere, and finally also the terrestrial atmosphere. In the solar spectrum both emission and absorption lines may occur, but in the planetary and terrestrial contributions only absorption lines are possible. In addition, in the direct solar spectrum we in fact see the terrestrial absorption as well, so the difference of the direct and Venusian observation is just the (twice of the) Venusian contribution.

            However the measurement is not easy if we look for gases abundant in the terrestrial atmosphere. So St John & Nicholson observed at maximal elongation. At such times the relative velocity of Earth and Venus is greater than 40 km/s, so the absolute value of the redshift is >10-4. This helps somewhat to separate Venusian and terrestrial water vapour.

            St. John & Nicholson in OTL 1922 were unable to see extra O2 and H2O absorptions in the Venusian spectra. I have no LCTL information about such a measurement before 1932. But it would be rather surprising if St. John & Nicholson had not tried with it in LCTL in 1922. That is another matter, what was the LCTL result. LCTL Venus has slightly more oxygen and substantially more water vapour than Earth does. Still, the overwhelming majority of the reflected light is reflected from the clouds, in OTL at 70 km height. We do not have information about the LCTL height; but anyway, simple reflected-light spectroscopy would yield information about the upper atmosphere.

            At the clouds OTL Venus' atmospheric pressure is some 0.5 psi, 4 % of the terrestrial surface value and some 5*10-4 part of the Venusian surface pressure. So there is not much absorption in the reflected light anyways. We do not know the height of the cloudy surface in LCTL. However, calculating with the same 70 km, LCTL Venus could not have given too much signal to St. John & Nicholson.

            Indeed, in OTL the 1922 paper [36] was not considered the last word. The authors were simply contradicting Nobelist Arrhenius. In a few years Adams & St. John detected some oxygen & water vapour on Mars [19], where light penetrates the entire atmosphere. (As we know now, this measurement was incorrect!) In contrast, the 1932 OTL Adams & Dunham measurement establishing a carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus was not a purely negative measurement.

            Even this OTL 1932 result is not valid now, in 2008. For this, let us see Table III of [37], slightly simplified: the mass of atoms in a column are

 

Gas, g/cm2

O2

CO2

H2O

Venus

<2

60

<0.1

Earth

230

0.4

0.7

Mars

<2

<20

0.05

 

Table 5: Planetary atmospheres according to 1942 OTL best knowledge [37]

 

            While this 1942 publication correctly suggests a predominantly carbon dioxide atmosphere of Venus, for our present (OTL) knowledge it would be too thin, by more than 2 orders of magnitude. Again: measurements detected only the atmosphere above the clouds.

            And this was known for everybody. So the St. John & Nicholson paper could not settle the question. Even if in LCTL they found some oxygen and water vapour, that might be similar to the OTL Adams & St. John measurement for Mars, again not settling anything.

 

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