Quote:The Idenites are. The marks of large-scale irrigation are visible pretty clearly, and they've got a deeper historic and scientific tradition. Scourines aren't.
Have the colonists on each planet retained awareness of the other group?
Why? Well, because when you can read by the light of the 'moon', there's really no reason to spend much effort lighting your cities.
Think about it. Luna's albedo is about .12, IIRC - which means that it's only about a third as reflective as Iden is... and, as they're seen from Earth and Scour's surfaces, 1/30th the diameter. Scour-seen-from-Iden is even brighter. Those life-forms living on their near-sides that have any sort of dark-vision at all are either pelagic or orignally native to someplace else.
Yes, that includes humans; their night-vision is as good or better than anything bigger than a tree shrew, on either world.
BTW, I figure that, without the moderating effects of large oceans, Scour's weather made the first couple generations want to whimper for their mommies. We're talking Martian windspeeds in air thicker than Earth's; their architecture probably makes classical Egyptian look open and fragile.
The basin plains do have sand - mostly it's a layer a few feet thick over a massive hardpan, which in turn will lie right above the basalt bedrock. You do not want to be out when one of the planetary sandstorms whips up.
Ja, -n
(*wishes he were better at drawing random patterns, so he could start on that map*)
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