"You realize the Mass thing is local, right? It is not a human universal."

"I don't know what Muggle conquerors who weren't British might come up with and I don't think that's really the point."

"If you found us pre-population controls and imposed them that would have been a good thing to do. People might even have had milder springs, back them, it's hard to know but there's definitely selection against milder springs in a uncontrolled or poorly controlled population."

"Okay but we wouldn't have thought to do that and we would have abolished your pollution rules for being stupid. It's like conquering other planets turns out badly or something."

"We're not doing only things you think are stupid, and the pollution thing is so we can coexist with you enough to do any of the stuff like eradicating cholera and slavery. If you went to a planet where everyone constantly screamed and you couldn't talk to each other over it or concentrate through it, you might make them stop that long enough for you to help them, if you were altruistically inclined."

"We'd wear earplugs."

"I would hate aliens who conquered Amenta and imposed values that were only-mostly-similar-enough."

"Oh, me too. I'd do something stupid."

"Mmhmm."

"We kind of could have guessed that, all things considered."

"I don't know whether, given the chance to change things so these hypothetical conquerors never found us, I'd take it. That depends on whether they were good on net, which has only a little bit to do with whether I'd hate them. I can imagine loathing them and still not taking the chance to cause them never to find us."

"Pretty much."

Miranda sighs and pats Minor's arm.

"So it turns out one of the barriers to the atmosphere-chalices was 'it's way harder to do things with gases for some reason' and that a totally workable solution is 'air, but a liquid'."

"For some reason 'air, but a liquid' didn't occur to us."

"Oh, cool! In the quantities necessary will that cool the planet much?"

" - how is it air if it's a liquid -"

"It boils!"

"It might significantly cool the planet. It would help if it could hold an atmosphere so that we'd do this once instead of doing it continuously."

"In principle you could do a sort of modified Bubblehead over the entire planet but it would be very conspicuous and also require power no individual wizard could produce so you're looking at weird ritual magic and I don't know nearly as much about that."

"If you could just add tons and tons of rock that would be equally conspicuous but more useful on the whole."

"It'll take a while but so will the air."

"We're talking about, like, 'coat the entire planet in miles and miles of rock' amounts of rock."

"Yes, the thing would be to make it self-replicating and then the trick is to cancel the spell before it exponentiates too much."

"Definitely would want to evacuate the arcologies but okay. ...a little bigger than Earth or Amenta would be fine."