"It's legal to build houses and farm food, neither is a huge fraction of our GDP, and some thought has already gone into making industries like that ridiculously scalable just in case there is some wild reason why a tenth of our infrastructure suddenly has to rebuild the other nine-tenths.  One year after dath ilan knows about Earth, we will have enough emergency arcologies set up to evacuate a billion people from Earth.  In two years we'll be ready to accept the entire population should that become necessary.  If we ran into a nicer civilization, I expect we would have reciprocal versions of the same arrangement, in case of asteroid strikes or alien invasions or ocean algae suddenly dying out."

"Yeah, that sounds neat, I mean, like, are you going to kidnap their children or forbid them from practicing their religion or stuff like that."

"I am willing to negotiate with you about what dath ilan won't do here, Isabella, since you have the power to grant or forbid us entry, and I expect my civilization will abide by agreements I make.  When it comes to determining what my people will require others to accept as a precondition of taking refuge in our Earth, I can only guess.  In this case I'd guess that it will not be permitted to deny children education.  I can almost guarantee that weird adults will be allowed to be weird.  Except insofar as they may try to inflict true death on their own brains or the brains of others... only I'm not sure we'd impose even that condition, if it meant that fewer refugees came to us."

"You could probably get a lot of uptake on freezing dead people if you sold it right and didn't otherwise antagonize people, but if you decide that, say, raising kids as monolingual Arabic speakers in an attempt to keep them primarily connected to their parents' culture, and only letting them learn Baseline when they're like ten so they'll have accents, is 'denying them education', you will have an uphill battle."

"I am not remotely the smartest, most skilled, or most moral individual of Civilization let alone its aggregate.  I expect we will run a prediction market on which policies have which results, weighted mostly toward which policies will save the most true lives, and do what the prediction market says."

"'True' lives?"

"Every mistake a civilization makes is ultimately repairable except for the mistake of a brain being destroyed.  ...Or so I would have said until I died in a plane crash and ended up here.  It's frankly hard to track the implications of that, and for purposes of presupposing that two-way portals with dath ilan are possible, I have mostly been ignoring it.  Realistically, the people much smarter than me would deduce a lot more about what it means, and there'd be a huge update in our understanding of reality, but I don't know what the output of that update will be... I guess it is a predictable directional update that true death may end up being treated as much less of an overriding consideration.  Or maybe even more of an overriding consideration, if the Lost Dead are randomly ending up in worlds even worse than this one.  But, again, mostly not thinking about it until the other parts of my thinking are in more of an equilibrium and my baseline emotional stability is higher.  I do suspect this is a topic that would drive people much more insane than astrology, if they come from the sort of civilization that can't figure out how to use likelihood functions in their science papers."

"They freeze dead people 'cause they think they'll be able to defrost 'em later and wake 'em up," Isabella explains to Alex.

"That might be against some people's religions."

"I'm aware. I hope the prediction markets are fast on the uptake. Or let Earthlings buy in, that might work too."

"We're going to have some issues with precognition and so on, but once we've worked those out, it is utterly against our philosophy not to let Earthlings buy in.  I do expect all of you to lose all your money, of course, because the prediction markets are not as stupid as I am.  Your civilization doesn't scale from individuals to aggregates in anything like the same way; for purposes of estimating the competence of dath ilan as a whole by looking at me, you need to imagine that I'm an average twelve-year-old, not an average adult."

"Huh, okay. I will set aside a responsible recreational gambling amount of money to play with your prediction markets to start."

"Please don't actually do that until precognition issues have been worked out.  That genuinely does present a huge issue to my civilization's core infrastructure for governance and sanity, if people are suddenly applying the no-trade theorem to each other because they don't know who has precognitive information.  I cannot reasonably threaten to withhold dath ilan contact on that basis, but I do ask politely that we arrange for things to not happen that way."

"I mean, you said those would be worked out somehow and I don't expect you to know how but also my range is only an hour, me in particular you could hedge out with some kind of delay on the system."

"I have no idea whether Civilization has emergency plans for suddenly needing to impose a one-hour delay on all trade executions before the corresponding market information becomes public, but it is a nontrivial cost to all of Civilization, sort of like your civilization suddenly becoming 10% less electrically efficient or all Internet connections suddenly acquiring an extra ten seconds of latency."

"I guess if you use them for policy decisions that follows, okay. I'll stay out till they have hired a precog to kick out other precogs from the system or something."

"But then anything markets touch will kick precogs out of that prediction, and our markets are everywhere, we can't just shut them down during eclipses to make the eclipses more predictable the way you do... but it works in the short term as soon as we can afford to hire a precog, I guess?  And realistically we only need a few hours for the people much smarter than me to look at this problem and come up with some clever arrangement that is way above my paygrade to actually figure out."

"I'll be curious to see what they come up with."

"Is a prediction market like a stock market?"

"You know how it's usually quite difficult to guess what stock markets would do, because if you knew what they would do on any routine basis, you could make a trillion dollars?  But lots of people would like to have a trillion dollars, so almost-everywhere the stock market already reflects all knowledge contained in people who would like to make money?  We did that for all the important questions that could be settled at any point in the future, using markets that pay out to whoever was right.  So Civilization knows everything about the probabilities over any important question that can be definitely settled later, that any member of Civilization knows now.  A lot of important issues are subjective, of course, and in that case Civilization only knows what preselected judge panels or random survey respondents will say in a few years."

"What if somebody knows a lot but doesn't have spare cash though?"

"We have rather fewer people who lack liquid assets in that way, but obviously most individuals can't have enough wealth to shift the larger market.  If the knowledge they have is of a form where they can't convince others, all they can do is place their own bets and wait to become wealthier and accumulate more of a track record.  If the knowledge is shareable, there are all kinds of arrangements which naturally allow the individual to capture some fraction of that knowledge's value to Civilization.  The classic literary trope involves making a deal with a mad investor who believes your crazy story, but for ordinary shareable knowledge you'd just make an ordinary deal with a more staid trading firm."

"Are you gonna make a lotta money having a head start on Earth?"

"The amounts of money I could make by trying slightly clever ideas are meaningless to me, and I don't particularly deserve that much or have any nonstandard ambitions.  I'll just play it straight, and some proud philanthropist will buy one percent of my impact for more money than I realistically know how to spend on myself.  My Civilization has a concept of - being extremely predictable about rewarding people who did the right thing when it mattered, in proportion to the scale of how much it mattered, even if it all has to be arranged afterwards?  If I do right enough things, I'll be a billionaire equivalent, and that frees me up to just worry about what is the right thing."

"What're your slightly clever ideas?"