At the End of All Things Elves in Revelation
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"If the aim here is to ensure that some humans survive the possible destruction of Earth and neighbors, so they can summon the rest back, then I don't think you'd want more than forty or fifty, you'd just be inviting complications."

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"That's millions of circles per person, bit much. And every time one of them died everyone they summoned would go home and have to be resummoned."

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"The problem with sending a couple hundred thousand people is that every supply summons runs some risk of a mistake destroying the ship, and with enough people over the course of five years that's practically guaranteed to happen."

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"Is Proxima Centauri the only habitable planet we know about, could we do a few of these separately?"

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"We know of lots but you're looking at a decade and a half of travel for the rest of them - Father, is FTL possible -"

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"I don't know. Probably. Not inside a century."

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"Yes if uploading works and gets around the demon mind limit let's not go there though."

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"Still have to get somebody out there in the first place, too."

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"Is there a reason not to send Elves on the longer trips -"

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"Spaceships are too small."

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"We're working on bigger ones. But yes. Right now we can't accelerate something tolerably-sized for Elves fast enough for summoning to work aboard it. You could have a collection of smaller ships, I guess, and fairy between them, but you'd need a fairy on-call for that pretty much all the time -"

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"And we're not very numerous, and haven't enough unmarried people to start a self-sustaining society anew somewhere -"

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"And for humans you can solve the genetic diversity bottleneck with demons implanting the pregnancies, can't do that for Elves."

(Elves present shudder.)

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"Probably. One person did get as far as trying."

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"We can't check whether it's possible?"

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"Not without trying it. Even if the one attempt didn't work it could just have been done wrong."

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Elves shiver. 

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"Sorry."

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"Not your fault."

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"We could send lots of different ships on different routes to Proxima Centauri B, even if we're not sending them farther than that."

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"That's a good idea."

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"A hundred ships of fifty isn't that much harder than one. The trajectories aren't even a problem as long as they can summon on the way."

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Nod. "This isn't an intractable amount of interviewing?"

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"Hourlong interviews?"

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"Probably."

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