"Ours are still below fifty percent on the prank thing but we should definitely send some people through to check. If it's all legit we will of course do our best to interpret everyone to everyone else wherever we expect it to help. Also we give our children secret tests sometimes but only after they've consented to getting them as a general concept."

"I kind of hope Ozytopia is a prank even if the rest aren't."

... the Bobbis register that they have all of the counterproductive issues mentioned by Ozytopia and also still have cryopreservation, and the impulse to do things that are good ideas. And washing machines, although it’s hard to make the kind that won’t damage decent clothing.

...dath ilan is familiar with washing machines.  Dath ilan would not ordinarily say this, because it requires some trust, but dath ilan registers the offer - dath ilan understands if you don't trust us enough for this, but still - dath ilan registers an offer to send us all available information on Ozytopia and we will figure out what needs to be done to fix it, in what order.  It sounds like you might, possibly, be doing more than one thing wrong at the same time.

"Oh, sure, with consent is different, although I don't think it's a widespread practice, most tests you can just explain what you're doing. I'm sort of worried about how those are malachitin diplomats? The specific people Ozytopia sent seem all right even if they describe a worrying home," Shrey replies to the Anomalan.

Whoa. The other worlds are probably utopias. Ozytopians are probably going to have to work on cultural translation for concepts like "factory farming" and "child abuse" and "poverty" and "disease" and "existential risk" since if everyone was making good decisions all the time you wouldn't have those anymore. Do they have moon bases?

Ozytopians are happy to share information with dath ilan! They have a neatly arranged summary of their educational system right here, they thought that would be the most important thing to share notes on.

Green has a permanent moon installation but it is not permanently staffed. Uh, they do also have factory farming and child abuse and poverty and disease, just, like, not in the same quantities it sounds like Ozytopia is dealing with.

Malachitians have washing machines. They're very common. They do not have moon bases (they're working on it) and, like the Greens, have those things (except factory farming, they don't have factory farming, they used to but currently they instead have really good fake meat) but Not Like It Sounds Like Ozytopia Does.

Also, ah, those-- or at least the ones other than the watching TV thing-- seem like clearer-cut examples of people doing counterproductive things than the malachitians were previously imagining and they would like to register that they'd perhaps used the concept imprecisely, those are very very uncommon.

Anomalans have reading when you would on reflection rather be playing with your kids, and vice versa, and in fact the constant tradeoff produced by only being able to do at most three pleasant activities at once is a major theme of a lot of their literature. Also some of them cut themselves but that's because it feels nice to them, or because they want artistic scarring patterns, not because they're sad, and it's only a problem if someone doesn't read the guidebooks and injures themself. Also nonzero child abuse and existential risk, and way too much disease but less every decade.

They do have a moon base! Here are some pictures!

"If this situation is actually what it appears to be at face value," the dath ilani says to the Anomalan and the Green, "we may need to consider what we can do about a rescue mission to all of those planets, considering that this cave system isn't wide enough that we could just offer to let everyone there move here.  It sounds like people are dying the true death in massive numbers, a lot of the others are very unhappy, and it's not obvious their civilizations will be able to take steps to fix that on their own."

"I'm not sure what kind of rescue mission you're imagining where there isn't anywhere else you can reasonably take your rescuees," says Shrey, "even if you have budget for it."

Ozytopians are trained diplomats and so none of them offer opinions on the concept of having a planet of saints and still having child abuse. Are you even trying. 

Ozytopians would like to reassure everyone that there isn't any factory farming in the Teachingsphere anymore, they realized that animals mattered ethically and everyone stopped eating meat unless they had a health reason and there are sufficiently few health reasons that they can afford to give all the animals incredibly happy lives. They're of course very upset about the factory farming outside the Teachingsphere but it's really hard to... do... anything about the rest of the world.

The diplomat seems to assume that all the more pro-suicide people will agree that the concept of living in a world with ongoing factory farming is sufficiently horrifying that a reasonable person would kill themself rather than be complicit. 

"I concur that something should be done, but we'll want to be delicate about it; many of them will resent being helped. How to translate--they will see it as a suggestion that they're inherently inferior and should consider us moral authorities, rather than simply poorer due to circumstances and a good target for additional resources? That's very imperfect but it's a first attempt."

Dath ilan, left to itself, would try to send through a team with the reconstructing-Civilization-from-a-minimum-package package, modulo whatever native resources are available and can be traded for.  Try to figure out how to hire and employ insane people.  Build functional cities with functional Governance, first with the goal of replicating quickly to make more cities, but also with enough spare capacity to take in and house the worst-off inhabitants of those worlds, in increasing numbers.

How does the Anomalan version work.

"One mustn't try to lick a cat*," says Shrey. "Build cities where, with what materials, gotten from whose territory?"

*An idiom meaning "to get overly involved in someone else's personal matters without the invitation or skills to do so usefully or without getting scratched in the face".

The linguist along to update the translation figures out what factory farming is; it never caught on on Firstplanet even before they were confident many animals are sentient because nobody was willing to spend enough money on meat to pay people to do such unpleasant work.

"We'd mine our own resources from otherwise unused land, on the default way we'd imagine things, unless it was easier to trade dath ilani pharmaceuticals for ore or refined metals?"

"If you appear to be aiming for a system where a bunch of you are governing a bunch of others it will read as hostile. Everything being consensual will help but for best results you want a tight feedback loop between population and government, with locals in positions of authority. And we also predict that finding unclaimed territory will be the first problem."

"Yes, I don't think there's a lot of unclaimed territory lying around on Green. Maybe they have a lower population what with all the suicide though?"

"Green's population is living or farming or mining everywhere?  How many people do you have?  - If you don't mind our asking."

"Coming up on ten billion, and no, we aren't actively developing all the land, but it still has option value and belongs to people."

"We have about two billion, and the wilderness is all claimed by the cities."

The delegate talking to Shrey and the dath ilani sends a message to their counterpart in the main room, who asks, "What are the wilderness management policies of your planets? To a first approximation, we have each city administering the surrounding wilderness, with issues of the oceans and the atmosphere handled at the continent level."

"You expect us to be unable to pay rent on - or buy, if it's an ownership thing - adequate territory?  They deliberately raise the prices to whatever they think we can't afford?  And are you visualizing a supermajority of their civilization being in favor of that, or some powerful minority being able to effectuate it against the will of most others?"

One of the Bobbiversians remarks that they used to have any factory farming, and then that mostly stopped when they started implementing universal basic incomes and people became less willing to work at factory farms, and now most countries ban any kind of selling dead animals! It wasn’t killing-yourself-immediately horrifying but it was still pretty horrifying! Any kind of selling-dead-animals incentivizes people to kill animals without giving them decent lives and that’s really bad! It’s like how creche owners need to treat babies and small children really well even if they’re pretty sure that they’re eventually going to kill them, it’s just unacceptable to be net-negative-happiness about it all.

”Oh, we really don’t have as much wilderness as we’d like,” says a Bobbiversian who seems to be cosplaying as a ridiculously pretty songbird. “It’s mostly tied up in private property, you know, and most people want to keep things the way they are by default, but lots of people want to release their bioluminescent bees upon the unsuspecting world or replace all of the trees with better trees and that only sometimes goes as planned.”

"Different countries handle land ownership differently but nearly everyone is signed on to compacts about environmental issues. In the countries nearest this cave most land is owned by individuals or organizations other than the government, though the government owns some too and has to enforce the compacts and any other relevant law in all the land belonging to its polity," is the Green response to the land use question.

"I suppose possibly you could buy it?" says Shrey. "But you'd have to get from the cave to wherever you were able to buy it, and I'm not sure what you'd buy it with, since it sounded like your plan needed the city first and would produce the value afterwards."

The Greens would like to request a translation check on that thing about killing Bobbi children?

Can somebody from the Bobbiverse say a few additional words about "creche owners"?