"What's Melkor and what's a god?"

"A god... let's say, is an entity which by the expedient of their extraordinary magical power also commands some authority among people of lesser power, does that seem like a good summary to you?" she asks Khemet. "Melkor is our evil one. He's in prison now."

"All of your worlds have magic?"

"Anaander's might not?"

"No magic."

"So no, but hers seems higher tech than yours."

"Do you have faster than light travel?"

"We do!"

"How?"

"I'll write something down for you."

"We're close, I'm told, but don't have it yet, except that Ainur can do instantaneous communication amongst themselves."

"I have no reason to think we're particularly close - had, a minute ago, no reason to think it was possible - but we need it very badly."

"- but you think it's plausible you'd get into a war with billions of casualties, even if you had it and were accordingly spread out more?"

"I think we'd do fine until we'd reached all the planets that were possible to inhabit. Maybe that'd never happen or by then we'd have successfully engineered ourselves to work differently or something. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that ten thousand years in the future the peoples descended from mine were embroiled in war. It'd be - very odd to make sure they don't exist so they can't kill each other."

"Well, yes, but maybe you want to also make sure to be on the lookout for ways to get a human-like birth rate."

"We do currently have human-like birth rates. - Anaander-human-like birth rates. We'd also benefit from a more painless way to achieve those, if anyone had them."

"Send all your women to decades and decades of education, make housing very expensive, put in reliable contraception by default, make them get a permit to remove it, spread a norm of marriage involving a party that costs a year of salary?"

"Obviously we give everyone contraception by default. Why would decades of education help anything? I guess it's one mechanism to decide who gets kids but an awfully cruel and wasteful one."

" - so humans will just mostly not have kids if there are economic incentives to instead stay in school until they're out of fertile years."

" - weird. We will not do that."

"Orcs just really like babies, they'll have a dozen apiece even after we invented them birth control and begged them to take it, and then they start bothering their older ones for grandchildren, is it like that?"

"Yes. - I mean, we don't let anyone have a dozen because then we'll get back to horrible wars - are the orcs near the carrying capacity of their planet -"

"Not yet but we expect to be able to terraform them as many planets as they want by the time that's an issue."

" - quite a bet to take."

"I also wouldn't expect them to resort to attacking their neighbors about it if they had to wait longer than anticipated, they're as immortal as we are and they can wait, they just don't strongly prefer to."