"Philosopher's Stone?"

"Immortality potion generating object."

"It's been his pet project forever but Mars is more urgent."

"Most Amentans wouldn't want to be immortal without unlimited space."

"Humans would. A human government would probably make it way more of a research and development priority."

"Is wizarding government in fact secretly great or are you comparing your fantasy against our reality, because that's not fair."

"No it's pretty shit."

"It really doesn't do much but I don't endorse any things it does do, so."

"Has any human government in fact been good. Or, like, as good as you think they should be given what they have to work with."

"You should probably ask Muggles that question, we don't follow their governance much? There are indigenous Muggle societies in the Americas that have egalitarian decisionmaking and peaceful relations with all their neighbors and that's really low tech. Pennsylvania's supposed to be really nice. I think there's a consensus that Athens was great given their tech level?"

Pelape writes this down.

"But anyway, we have a chance to get it right now."

Sigh.

"It's better that you came than not, it's just nowhere near the best we can do."

"It's better we came than not but you have no qualms about making us really regret it."

"I think, on the whole, deterring Amentans from conquering planets instead of opening trade relations with them and asking to purchase land is an added bonus to kicking you out. I do want you to be okay, it's not your fault."

"It's not the fault of most of the people whose lives you're planning to ruin."

"...it's pretty obvious how it's Aitim's fault, really. And everyone here went 'oh, yes, conquering a planet and subjugating its inhabitants and moving there and keeping secret from them that we intend to engage in mass sterilizations and a war on their religions, that sounds like how I want to spend the next couple years of my life.'"

"If he hadn't wanted the job someone else would've. You realize that if you in fact don't need population controls that's a contingent fact about you, right, it doesn't mean that it's not the best option to have them in any species with a greater reproductive drive? If you go warping around and you find a species that likes to have a hundred apiece and just hasn't run into problems with this yet because they're a prey species and haven't invented enough weapons, will you go 'oh, that's fine'?"

" - we definitely wouldn't try to conquer them and impose them. We obviously do think that species with a population problem shouldn't get warp."

"Yeah I just find I have no sympathy to 'trap them on their planet where ninety eight percent of them are eaten before they can have children' as a solution to this hypothetical species."

"You do a lot of 'what people actually want and what solutions they would find acceptable doesn't matter, there's an objectively correct solution and if violence is the only way to impose it, well, if it's quantitatively less violence than was occurring otherwise there's nothing at all wrong with it.' I don't do that. If these people were like 'we want to solve this with population controls instead of a high death rate, we need someone to enforce them', fine. If these people were like 'probably dying is worth it to us to have as many kids as we want' - well, then intervening seems a lot like making Amentans all immortal and sterile and going 'well, you were dying before, we saved you from dying'. Would you be all right with someone conquering you to do that?"

"You're purporting consensus. There is none."

"We could take the ones who want to have two kids and no death rate to live somewhere different from the ones that want to take their chances. This is a hard problem, I'm not denying that, I just think it's completely insane to treat the Amentan solution to this hard problem as the right one, instead of the one that happened to mostly work for you and might be much worse than death for some different species or even some different culture."

"We only get to implement one solution. Even if it's a mixed strategy."