"Attached is a general prospectus on types of space infrastructure and their properties."

The attached document has material constraints on how large they can make structures under various levels of force and also goes into the various tradeoffs in power consumption, maintenance, size and performance of active support structures.

They will receive a flood of suggestions. "Design your ideal space habitat" is the sort of dinner-party conversation that everyone has an opinion on. A substantial subset of those designs are even proper engineering diagrams that take their expressed material constraints into account.

As a general trend, the þereminian designs tend to completely eschew active support structures. They overwhelmingly prefer spin gravity and solar power, although some smaller designs have backup thermal radioisotope generators. They also have a strong dispreference for things that involve a lot of maintenance.

When freed from budgetary constraints, þereminian designs tend to be overbuilt, with huge safety margins and multiple redundant systems. A few people submit six variations on the same design, expressing different points on the tradeoff between assumed-construction-cost and redundancy.

Also in evidence: big windows for natural sunlight, deep soil beds for growing trees, dubiously practical space-efficient micro-gravity hydroponics, and bedrooms that consist entirely of cushions.

Each design will get replies with notes about practical issues they might have missed like potentially wanting static wrappers to protect rotating habitats from space debris and also how large windows may be undesirable given now fast even large habitats rotate if they are built in proximity to other objects such as planets or if they have direct exposure to sunlight.

The minimal use of active support structures is acceptable though they are the only available surface to orbit option that doesn't require independent aerospace craft or teleportation.

Teleportation is actually preferable, if they're offering? But mainly people are planning to just make every space-habitat self-sustaining, since the aliens seem happy to build quite large structures for them. If they're all self-sustaining, then there will be a lot fewer urgent rescues, and they can probably cover that with rocket-based infrastructure, at least in near-planet orbit.

They definitely, absolutely can't have a space elevator. A space fountain is similarly bad.

Sure, it would be way more efficient for lifting things to orbit, but have you seen the calculations of what would happen if one of those had a structural failure? That would be species-ending. They've only got one habitable planet at the moment and they intend to keep it that way. Maybe once there are 6 independent self-sustaining colonies they could do a space elevator. But teleportation just seems better in every way.

Active support structures are extremely reliable with reasonable maintenance (have some figures about the details of that) and some structure designs have much less catastrophic failure modes than balanced tensile lift structures (see attached calculations for this). That said it's entirely reasonable to prefer to minimize risks with even relatively low likelihoods.

Teleportation in particular is one of the things they're least willing to part with, because of how easy it is to abuse.

Hmm.

There are now Network arguments about skyhooks versus magnetic launch solutions versus other stranger designs.

One group of people have gotten together to collaborate on designing a large space city intended to house a million people and the infrastructure necessary to support them.

"Hi — super excited about space, thanks for the opportunity — we[ex] were wondering whether you just object to giving us[ex] teleporters on an ongoing basis? Like, even if you're going to build something to our[ex] specifications, we[ex] still don't really have the launch capacity to handle initial relocations, even if we[ex] can probably handle ongoing resupply. So if we[ex] got everyone who wants to settle in Space City to get together in a particular location with our[ex] belongings, would you be willing to teleport us[ex] up?"

"We[ex] will offer support with relocating people and materials if there is a plan for supporting them though reasonable contingencies without our[ex] direct intervention. Gathering all of the materials and individuals to be moved is not required so long as adequate assurances are made that their relocation is uncoerced."

That's ... a slightly baffling response. Putting someone who doesn't want to be there on your space station sounds like a great way to stop having a useful space station. They're building in as much redundancy as they can, but that's not going to stop a dedicated saboteur.

... maybe the aliens just don't think the average þereminian will be capable of making their presence on the station an obvious net negative?

The Space City Planning group responds with a new design that includes prominent, well-marked, accessible levers for wedging the airlocks open and venting sections of the city to space.

It takes markedly longer than usual for a response to be formulated. "We[in] appear to be having a substantial miscommunication. Allowing individuals to end their lives and those of substantial numbers of individuals around them is not a response we[ex] expected. The worst case of mass forced displacement does not seem likely given your communication thus far, but making it easy to shift that into mass death does not address it. We[ex] will seek confirmation from individuals before relocating them."

A miscommunication seems pretty likely, yeah! The aliens clearly think death is bad ... so they either don't believe that þereminians believe that, or they think þereminians are sufficiently bad at planning that thinking that won't be sufficient incentive to take steps to make it not happen?

Ouch. That feels really rude, actually.

But the correct thing to do when someone from a foreign culture seems to have given you a grave insult is get a specialist involved. Diplomatic Corps! We choose you!

Diplomat Tatenika has been having an extraordinarily busy day. Maybe when first contact is over she should retire and take up a nice relaxing hobby like herding cats.

"Speaking on behalf of the Space City Planning Group: We[ex] apologize for the inadvertent miscommunication. SCPG is an initiative to found a new city. Historically, we[ex] have found that attempts to found new cities with non-volunteers doesn't work, and often ends up with everyone having wasted a lot of time and resources. See the attached Archive references for historical accounts. This makes sense from the perspective of game theory: if someone doesn't want to be involved in founding a new city, they are incentivized to make including them in the process as difficult and unpleasant as possible. That way, when the city-founders are rational, they don't involve those people in the plan."

"As a result of this historical knowledge, modern attempts to found cities are traditionally done only with volunteers. There is no actual law against not doing that, for the same reason that there isn't a law against lighting your own face on fire — people mostly know not to try. There is a law against forcing people to belong to a political group or forcing them to work when they do not choose to. See the global minimum standards that were previously shared. If the SCPG had attempted to do those things, they would have been subject to a GMSB tribunal, which is an additional disincentive."

"When you said that you were worried about people who didn't want to be part of Space City being added to the transport list, the planning committee inferred that either you didn't believe that their screening procedures for volunteers were sufficiently robust, or that you didn't believe the cultural disincentives from our existing institutions were strong enough, in the face of getting to live in space. But since you have evinced a preference for not informing our decision making, they assumed that you wouldn't be willing to improve screening procedures. So they added additional ways to disincentivize the use of involuntary colonization, so that you could see that they were trying their best to avoid involving non-volunteers, even if you didn't trust our[ex] established legal system."

"When you responded negatively to that and said that you would implement your own screening procedures, the planning committee took that to mean that you didn't think that they were rational beings capable of responding to incentives. I have assured them that this is almost certainly not the case, and that, in my professional opinion, this is very likely a miscommunication caused by missing cultural context. I have encouraged them to assume that aliens are even weirder than they were assuming, and that they should avoid making assumptions about what you will or will not be able to infer from our[ex] transmissions."

"In that spirit: I do not believe that you have done anything incorrectly, and I have done my best to convey to the planning committee that they have not been insulted. But we[ex] have multiple probably-evolutionarily-designed* involuntary decision-making procedures in our brains, and while the committee is rationally committed to continuing to work productively toward our[in] goal of seeing peaceful settlement of space, some members of the committee would be emotionally reassured if you would confirm my assessment. It would, in my opinion as a diplomat, smooth further relations if you were to compose and issue a brief apology. See On the Purpose and Composition of Apologies for an explanation of the underlying psychology and how to compose an apology that will be correctly received."

*i.e. stupid.

"Thank you for your thorough evaluation of this miscommunication. It is a standard part of our[ex] procedures to seek confirmation from individuals before relocating them and ensure that their relocation is freely chosen. We[ex] apologize for our[ex] lack of care in communicating this such that it seemed this was an expression of mistrust particular to that group or to the people of your world in general.

"Our[ex] procedures are built on the assumption that those we[ex] are communicating with may be attempting to deceive us[ex] and while we[ex] have no reason to believe that is the case here, and indeed the evidence so far made available to us suggests the opposite, we[ex] will continue to follow those procedures out of an abundance of caution. We[ex] hope you will not take this caution, especially at this relatively early stage as further insult.

"The suggestion of making it easy for individuals to vent large sections of a habitat does make sense under the assumption that individuals consistently behave rationally. If your people can be modelled under that assumption, that is an exceedingly unusual trait. Most societies we[ex] encounter have at least some significant portion of the the population, typically more than one person in one thousand, have at least one emotional episode which makes them a danger to themselves and those around them during their lifetime. Typically this dangerous behavior is not something they would endorse outside of that episode.

"To clarify our[ex] earlier statement regarding allowing you to select your own path we[ex] have an interest in not directly facilitating harms such as forced relocation. We[ex] do not consider checking for consent when moving individuals to be an example of influencing your decision making process over and above the influence already entailed by offering such relocation."