[MUD-Dev] Persistent Worlds

[Travis Casey]

Tuesday, February 20, 2001, 1:18:55 PM, the_logos at www.achaea.com <the_logos at www.achaea.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> the logos <the_logos at www.achaea.com> wrote:

>>> Right. So, in fact, not the sort of dragons in the sort of
>>> settings most people use.

>> I'm not sure there's a lot of constancy in the definition of
>> dragons.  Chinese dragons are quite different from AD&D Tiamat
>> which are quite different from most Medieval dragons (religious and
>> heroic art, Arthur, etc) is different from Tolkein's dragons (LotR)
>> are different from LeGuin's (DragonFlight) are different from Andre
>> Norton's (Earthsea) are different from Pier's Anthony (Xanth) etc.

> This is the last post I'm going to make on this, as I don't care
> whether you use dragons as giant lizards or dragons as flying
> fire-breathing creatures. They don't exist. They aren't real.

The fact that X *doesn't* exist doesn't have a lot to do with whether
X *can* exist.  I think that's the point that the original poster was
trying to make.  There are a lot of things that are either theoretically
or demonstrably possible under the known laws of nature, but which
don't exist right now -- e.g., flying cars, dinosaurs, artificial
intelligence, and telepathy (1).

> At most, in the case of giant lizards, they once existed, but they
> certainly didn't exist in conjunction with people at all, and
> especially people capable of forging weapons.

Megalania prisca, a giant lizard related to the monitor lizards,
reached lengths of up to 20 feet -- and lived in Australia up to about
25,000 years ago.  Humans first came to Australia about 60,000 years
ago.

1 - I know that *someone's* going to complain about that being in the
    list.  What I mean is that there is no fundamental law that
    prevents telepathy from being possible (as there seems to be for,
    say, gross-effect telekinesis or precognition).  As far as is
    known, telepathy doesn't exist, but it *could* exist, in theory.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_    Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)   


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