At the End of All Things Elves in Revelation
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"Maybe everybody will suddenly improve now that they know they will go on forever, then."

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"Wouldn't surprise me. I think part of what keeps Elf societies peaceful is the anticipation you're going to have to live with everybody forever."

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"Limbo's a lot more populous than Valinor."

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"Limbo's got other things going on but I do expect that absent the horrible scarcity they'd be much nicer than mortal humans."

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"The scarcity is at least not genuinely physically dangerous."

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"Humans are very psychologically resilient. But still."

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"Are they? We, I guess, since this is a psychology claim -"

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"If there were Elves in Limbo they would probably blind themselves and then curl up and sing as loudly as possible and it would never really become feasible for them to do things other than that."

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"I'm not sure that's 'psychologically resilient' so much as 'don't have the specific prettiness thing'."

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"You can function much better with much fewer needs met, if you like."

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"Live humans fall apart under sleep deprivation that as far as I can tell you all undertake for convenience alone," Cam points out.

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"I'm really not clear on what Eru was going for with humans."

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"That's his style. And the vulnerability to disease, and the societally determined ethics. But the needing a lot of sleep and the lousy memories and the mediocrity at singing don't seem grand and tragic, just - pointless."

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"Maybe he gets something out of the comparison between how humans work and what they accomplish and how Elves work and what they accomplish."

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"Elves left to their own devices mostly independent of starting conditions get to high-trust communities with most resources devoted to making pretty things, literacy optional, industry almost certainly no. Humans have more variance, but at least sometimes you get farther than that."

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"Dwarves get industry and suck less along the way."

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"Better incentives - the way to get rich as a Dwarf is to be really good at trading, even if you were an amoral Dwarf you wouldn't end up starting wars -"

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"Sure, but where are the better incentives coming from if not the species difference -"

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"The starting conditions - I bet if you started humans with seven underground cities that were trivial to defend and absurdly hard to attack from you wouldn't get many wars -"

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"I'm not certain of that but it'd be an interesting experiment."

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"We could make a planet somewhere and do it!"

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"Where are you going to get pristine unconfounded humans?"

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"I gave some thought to artificial wombs for humans before Revelation - it'd make the colony project easier - but now it seems better not to do research down that avenue at all. Perhaps we could find volunteers."

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"The volunteers will not be pristine and unconfounded. For that matter, artificially wombed babies would still have to be brought up by somebody, although I guess you could get close to starting from scratch if you corralled some brand new daeva and summoned them for an experimental language and gave them basic parenting instructions and nothing else."

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