Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

Neksil: "We have plenty of those, and also plenty of miners. The latest Imperial Census put the ratio of the number of drones to keepers to be four dozen and two to one, so I don't think you'll exceed supply? How big is your population? Putting together all remna, we have passed one billion since the last Census.

In the case that you do exceed supply, we can simply birth more, although there's a large lead time to that. It takes one year to gestate, one year to incubate, a dozen years pre-puberty, and three years for puberty. If all the drones are doing is caring and housework, then training can begin on the onset of puberty, which would be a dozen and two of our years – sixteen and a half in standard years. For technician work, and work that requires hard labor, drones which haven't gone through puberty wouldn't have either the physical constitution or the brain development necessary for training to be worth it. For them, it will take...a little over twenty standard years."

Restem: "We would greatly appreciate design improvements to reduce fumes. We only really care about the fumes being released into the environment – the drones who work in the facility wear protective equipment.

...I believe that our planet's atmosphere is similar to yours – this was one of the things tested during first contact. Indeed, it seems that we are able to breathe each others' air, given that we are all here in this cave currently. We definitely don't want temperature extremes – we've already had enough of that in the ancestral-environment – but I don't see why the power plants would cause that? Granted, I'm not a physicist or a chemist – perhaps one of my team would know."

Oh. That is - that is a large number. That's not all people, though, right? That's just - deep breaths, Jeff, try not to pause too long, it's impolite.

Jeff is definitely ruffling kis feathers and ke's pulled a pen from kis utility belt, not to write with, just to twiddle in one hand.

"We don't have a very good census, but - less than that," ke replies carefully.

"It turns out that burning fuels that release carbon dioxide - and especially if they also release sulphur dioxide, which is incidentally also the bit that makes them really unpleasant, we now have better filter designs to get the sulphur out in the first place - anyway, that makes the atmosphere better at retaining solar heat? We discovered this pretty much by accident while experimenting with combining exhaust fumes for their waste heat and solar heating - the fumes also held heat better than clean air.

It's a pretty subtle effect over a whole planet, if you have the space then ensuring you have enough established forest should counteract it? We'd deforested areas near shore during the time when wood was the best building material, so we had to do some replanting - if you're land based I expect you've also been clearing forest for living area?"

And because you have a billion people - well, a billion people sized individuals to support - you must be using a lot of living area, ke doesn't say.

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

Neksil frowns slightly at the change in Jeffinar's demeanor, but recovers. Ah, he's stimming. Understandable.

Both of them simply nod at Jeffinar saying they have fewer people. "We have about twenty million Keepers," Restem adds, hoping to clarify.

Restem: "Oh, I didn't know about that effect. I'll commission an Imperial Inquiry on the topic of carbon dioxide and heat retention, and see whether there are temperature and climate trends we can observe ever since we started burning lots of coal and oil for fuel. We'll be able to act on it more meaningfully after they've produced a monograph." He makes a few gestures towards the drone beside him – presumably signing – and the drone leaves.

"Yes, we have, for agriculture and living space, although we don't clear all of it. Partly because many places have beautiful flora and fauna that we wish to preserve, and also because we want to have wood to build with – in many cases, old trees are preferable. Wood is still used a lot nowadays, although now we have concrete and steel, which we didn't have before. We have also been experimenting with hydrocarbon polymers made using light fractions of petroleum – it's promising, but hasn't produced anything useful for building with."

A drone returns after a minute, to say that the seaweed has been cleared for remna consumption. Hooray! Restem refrains, but Neksil tries the seaweed. 

Neksil: "It's really good. It has the right crunch, and the salt is wonderful – it is sea salt, yes? Sea salt has better flavor, at least for me – the...composition of it is different from rock salt. I don't quite like the one with honey, though, it seems like a dissonant flavor combination to me." A drone records this observation on paper.

"Oh, we have a number of oil-composites stabilised, we should get you the formulations - we've by no means exhausted the possibilities but they're very good, look, my pen uses them so you can see the ink levels - less brittle than glass and it doesn't break as dangerously if it does snap."

Jeff offers kis pen to anyone who would like to have a look, and gets out another one.

"Yes, I suppose there must be rock salt deposits but we've never really looked, for the obvious reasons?

Quite a lot of our cuisine does combine sweet and salt, but not all of it, sometimes we just want something purely savoury."

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

Restem will keep his distance, but Neksil will get very close to look at the pen, though not touching it. He's not sure whether Jeffinar explicitly offered/permitted for the pen to be touched. What does it look like?

Neksil will offer his own pen, both to be looked at and touched and used, which is a red metal fountain pen with gold-dust lacquerwork, in a square and octagon tessellation pattern. It will either look gorgeous or gaudy, depending on Jeffinar's aesthetic tastes. Sadly, the pen is made for remna hands and would likely be too thin for Jeffinar to handle comfortably. It writes in blue-black ink.

Restem: "True! You would have no reason to mine for rock salt given that you live on the sea. I personally like sweet-and-salty combinations, but not everyone does. The drone also told me that other samples of your offered snack food has been tested and found fit for consumption, so I think it's very likely that food suitable for you will be suitable for us. This will be great news for all the people who will want to sell drones to you.

Speaking of which, what is your unit of currency? The Imperial Government produces notes which are backed by the gold standard. One rupnu is exchangeable for one grake of gold, which is...almost exactly one gram of gold. That is the minimum amount you need to exchange it at the bank – most people transact in fractions of rupnu, which is split into one gross fepni. You mentioned people getting compensated for unpleasant rotational work by getting first-pick on desirable berths and such – do they pay for them normally?"

Tetratopia and Jupital of Kastakia

The kind of reciprocation we were expecting was trade of equivalent knowledge, until we get a feel for what sort of things each world has and needs. Your construction techniques for our construction techniques, your medical techniques for our medical techniques. The expectation of reciprocation isn't strict; we won't offer too much that it feels imbalanced to us, and before it gets to that point we'll explicitly flag things, and if it turns out you say something of Tetratopia's is unexpectedly worthless to you we will take that into account. Part of why we want to trade standard-techniques for standard-techniques is because they're very comparable, even across vast gulfs of understanding. 

Speaking of standard-construction-techniques, oh boy does Tetratopia have those. If you need a concrete-building for basically any purpose, that can be done at the price of dirt-cheap, here's how we do it. (There's a handful of standard-construction-techniques related to water, but they all assume the entire industrial base is on land, and they're not all that good if one is used to water-based construction; the Kastakian construction techniques are unexpectedly valuable to us! Seasteading is a cool-but-impractical thing we kind-of-want to do and it looks like you're further down the scaling-curves than us.)

What kind of applications of ocean-going construction does Kastakia think are coolest? Tetratopia builds mostly on land, with our boats being mostly to move things between two land-based sites, so there might be some interesting uses that no prophecy-author has thought of.

Speaking of medical techniques, given the difference in our biologies, it seems that a lot won't transfer over. If your circulatory systems work like ours, here's how we do cryonics; we've tried things on smaller taxonomic-animals than humans so some of our work applies. Cryonics is very important! Are you making sure to cryopreserve everyone?

Tetratopian moral axioms, though you will see some debate about this among philosophy-fans, are generally agreed to be about satisfying preferences, with frustrating some preferences to satisfy more preferences elsewhere being okay, subject to a lot of guardrails because in real life if you try to frustrate some preferences to satisfy others in obvious ways it doesn't work, and it is not something that's been fully hashed out to the degree that one can follow a single written preference-satisfaction rule /invitation-for-comment //emphasis*. On a global scale, Modernity does the job of collecting information about people's preferences, and then uses prediction markets to predict what policies would best do that. The decision for us to visit the cave, instead of some other people, is downstream of that process. People making voluntary positive-sum trades with each other using the skills they have and enjoy using are generally how this happens in real life for most circumstances; one guardrail is to try to do things that interest you, instead of naively-better things that don't interest you.

Genetic customisation of treatment is something that Tetratopia would be cheerful about collaborating on! Again, apparent biology differences, but Tetratopia's current understanding allows medical prediction-markets to order a lot of stats to be done at a genome and sometimes update their predictions of the effects of known-standard-treatments a little bit from that, and even just having better stats to make larger updates would be an improvement that could be shared.

Likewise, cheerful on collaborating on improving solar panel efficiency (unstated for now: to switch from nuclear)!

Lighter-than-air repeater stations... hm, we don't have much like that - ah, because it's difficult to run underground cables to points floating on the surface of the water! Well- ah, the physicist sounds like they're talking about "satellites", repeaters-in-stable-orbits, so we expect there will be some valuable exchange there.

Tetratopia's public improvements are better and cheaper optimal-tileable consumer-goods; better food, better clothes, better furniture.  

* Standard sentences frequently make use of tone markers, which may be omitted in translation to languages that do not have them by default. //emphasis is a rare tone-marker that applies to a tone-marker.

Hansil to Cinsal

". . . I have lots of questions but I think it'd be best to take my time to compile them."

Or watch from afar until his observations and the answers to his survey questions crystallize into a coherent picture. That's the best strategy for satisfying Hansil's level of urge to interrogate in general. Never mind the number of questions that would have to be asked to help him get the sprout of a grip on 'leader'ship and sapient drone-eusocials, and Cinsal's seeming preference to move on.

Eyyeh to Reren

So Eyyeh's life is now a literary science fiction novel, then. One deep enough for the protagonist to have gone in with the idea that he is a science fiction protagonist, but not with mental preparation for the actual level of foreignness that actual aliens present. Got it.

". . . Let me be sure I've got all of that.

You don't senesce. You're a eusocial species that evolved sapience under heavy predation. You make 'drones' with simpler utility functions than the sexually reproducing among you - Keepers - but who are also sapient - both asexually and sexually, but Keepers only sexually. Drones always operate as arms of a Keeper, because their desires are always largely inherently tied to pleasing him. What about sexually begotten drones, are their loyalties divided or random or what?

. . . and - Keepers themselves used to be - independent, but, this - Imperator - what, just - took over your entire planet and its memetic evolution? Was he some kind of superintelligent aberration? Was he known to have had outside help? Is he now dead or otherwise gone? How could one man just - I mean, I know, heroes are a big deal, but they don't unilaterally strong-arm memetic and genetic equilibria into fitting their preferences. How, physically, did the Imperator convince reality to change to fit his preferences? If he's gone, why doesn't it change back to the way it was?"

Selno to Yompam on Brains, Exchanging

Hansil has, by now, been thoroughly distracted.

Selno asks a few questions after how the Kastakian version of dissociative identity disorder differs from the human version, and cuts himself off, not wanting to tip his hand about any of his budding hypotheses.

He asks into considerably more detail about their dementias, taking notes.

". . . What? What do you mean by 'does everyone have similar genetic codes'? Species exist but one medical treatment often works for many people, and those are the ones you generally seek out first in the search tree because they're the highest return-on-investment.

Mass breeding experiments? Like, someone with spare money who wants to prove something, pays a bunch of people to agree to have kids with whoever, videos an assistant blind to his hypothesis splitting them into experimental and control groups and pairing them off according to his theory? And then the kids get measured on whatever he wants to prove? Or, what do you mean?

'Serious-adults'? What is that? I got 'research-endeavor-division' from context, I think. An R&D department, right? But - 'endeavor-group' - from context you would be saying 'company'?    . . . Anyway, whatever, I'd love to talk to Juiptal about starting in on exchange! Somehow I was afraid the aliens wouldn't be as gung-ho about all that as we were." He smiles. "It's a trope in science fiction, but I guess the writers had to create conflict somehow." He smiles even more.

Cinsal to Hansil

"Of course," Cinsal replies, and leaves to offer to replace Lisal in talking to the Tetratopians so that he can instead talk to Hansil.

Reren to Eyyeh

"Correct. Correct. Correct. Correct. We make a distinction between Masters and Controllers. Masters are those who are authorized to give commands to drones, and each drone may have multiple. Each drone has exactly one Controller, and they have top-level-privileges and may add or remove Masters, or modify what sorts of orders they can give to drones, as well as countermand any orders previously given. In the case of sexually-begotten drones, the birthing-parent is the one who is the Controller, but then Controllership is passed to Keeper offspring once they develop. In virtually all of these cases, all three Keepers are Masters of the drones produced.

Not the entire planet – only our ancestral continent – there were no remna on the other continents until we colonized them. He is known to have been very intelligent. While he didn't take any modern intelligence tests, for drones or otherwise, it is estimated that he was +5sd or otherwise highly above mean on many traits of mentation. He did not have outside help, if you're referring to aliens. He had his drones, of course, as well as his allies.

He is dead. He passed away from illness a few gross years ago – his bodies and personal effects are in a mausoleum at the northern polar ice cap, as was his request. Many people make pilgrimage there, or likewise arrange for their bodies to be similarly frozen when they die.

I think you could strong-arm genetic and memetic equilibria provided sufficient force. For example, as I said before, people with genetics or memes which were not conducive to his vision for society were marginalized or killed, and I think that would be enough to shift equilibria into a different stable state. Or rather, not think – since this is what happened. He was aware that he could die, which is why he took steps to transition the institutions of Imperium into more robust ones that could survive even after his demise, such as transitioning legislature, executive, and judiciary to be democratic, or at least be appointed by democratically elected people, as well as figuring out how to transition the loyalties of military and civil servant drones – which at the time were all personally loyal to him – to other people in as seamless a way as possible. This system was already running for more than a gross years before his death, so his loss was not catastrophic to our system, and did not produce a power vacuum."

Ikkeh to Jeeee

Ikkeh notices the Kastakian writing system and is simultaneously struck by awe, and laser-incendiated by curiosity.

"My list? You mean the list of things Kastakia has, that I'd like the credit for bringing to Byway? Functional seasteading, of course."

Ikkeh looks mildly abashed when the Tetratopians more warrant Jeeee's excitement than he, but he knows it's true. For now.

Then he looks like he anticipates needing to look horrified very soon. "What's a retirement?"

Kriv (& Ect) to Talaskai

Kriv is impressed. "How old do Kastakians generally live to be - if that's not too personal? And if it's not too personal, or too forward, how old are you?" What if the Kastakians are just - smarter than us, and haven't yet surpassed our technology level because of some arbitrary social thing? "And about how many of you are there, total? If you know. And how many people do you know?" Kriv realizes this might be pushing it, but he hasn't sensed an incoming loss yet.

"You don't ever work with any physically-wired information- or energy-connectors at all, huh. (?) Is that area already exhausted enough for innovation, that you think you have good reason not to expect looking into very flexible long-range physical power connectors for nuclear, to ultimately be worth it?"

It's the kind of idea you simply can't sell to an alien civilization before you understand it. It's the kind of idea you offer to a member of an alien civilization to incline kim to explain kimself to you, so you can even get a foot in the door for future exploitation.

"Kwemaru is scared of you," says Ect. ". . . 'Endeavor-group'? The translator I hired way back missed that one, sorry, could you explain?"

Lak to Meliashae on Infotech

"What exactly kept you from making transistors again? You had enough prepared silicon, and germanium, to show that they could make cheap transistors but manufacturing was just slow? Are there any other things you know of that are bottlenecked by manufacturing like that?" He's just sending feelers out, trying to get a sense of the shape of things. Byway has a lot of things that are bottlenecked by scale - rocketry, for example, is exclusively funded by people who are able to build up a lot of surplus wealth - but transistors existing commercially at all being bottlenecked by scaling manufacturing feels unfamiliar to him in a way that - he thinks - can't possibly be explained simply by Kastakia being ocean-first.

Jeffinar and the Imperium

Jeffinar is a little taken aback that someone would get up close to the pen rather than taking it, and swiftly clarifies that this pen absolutely is a gift-without-obligation, as this seems to be important to them.

Ke examines the other pen with admiration, but it is very clearly not suitable for kis use as a pen.

"...some of the retirement-homes have units-of-exchange between themselves? Rotational work is tallied up in an account, some people like the specific returns to be legible and some people prefer to only have a vague idea that they've built up a reasonable amount of credit?

Sometimes a group of endeavour-groups that are doing a complicated set of resource trades will have a unit-of-exchange between themselves, but we don't have a - generalised-unit-of-exchange? Usually if one person wants something another person has, they make a case for why they should have it, maybe arrange to offer something in exchange if it's particularly scarce or onerous to get hold of - but usually it's pretty clear who can best use something, and people are more looking for places where their resources would be useful?"

Jupital and Tetratopia

Jupital is far too good at crisis management to say "What's a cryonics?" but ke really, really want to say "what's a cryonics?"

"Yes, it's very important everyone gets caught up on each other's standard-techniques," Jupital tries instead, hoping that this will cause them to clarify whatever they mean by 'imbalanced'.

"Coolest... I mean, I think the recent improvements in automatic control of stabilisation fins to mitigate heavy seas on hospital vessels are the coolest, but that's something I'd expect everyone to have a different opinion on.

You'd want to talk to Yompam for details of the circulatory system, I'm much more of an administrator of Langhame than a medical professional.

Oh, yes, we do have a lot of consequentialism and debates over types of utilitarianism - preference utilitarianism does work quite well with a reasonable rule-utilitarian safeguard, yes. A lot of people do organise their lives by some form of religious deontology as the primary source of axioms, but most of our religions do boil down to something like that except God is also held to have some preferences - what those preferences are is the greatest form of religious disagreement, of course.

Some people do attempt to run - I'm not quite sure what a prediction market is, but it sounds somewhat similar to career-matchmaking-clearinghouses? They're very useful for people who don't have a strong idea of what they want to do and want to find something that's good for other people but also, as you say, will interest them.

It sounds like Tetratopia has a lot more - standardisation? We do regularly try to produce and follow standards - that is another reason why it's so important everyone shares standard-techniques, so things aren't gratuitously incompatible - but generally unless there's a huge advance, like computers capable of handling individual text terminals for over-radio communication were, things spread fairly slowly as whatever was being used for that purpose previously wears out?"

Kastakian native language is a bunch of tonal whistling with clicks, emphasis being provided mostly by volume and speed; there are a few enthusiastic translators that appear to have just about got the knack of speaking other languages in a rather parrot-y fashion who are doing a lot of work to keep all this running.

Yompam and Selno - Byway

Yompam is very happy to hold forth for some time on detailed dementia case studies, current best practice treatments (basically all palliative rather than curative, although there are a few things that look like dementias but are in fact nutritional deficiencies or chronic dehydration, which seems to be much harder to induce in Kastakians but still possible with a picky enough diet), and where having separated parts tips over into being awkward for people (ke doesn't seem to consider most cases of dissociative identity disorder to be a disorder, simply something most people experience at some point in their lives, it's only when the identities have unshared memory or lack of switching control and some are not capable of reasonable adult behaviour that there's a problem).

"By similar genetic codes I mean, do you-plural even have a genetic code of the kind I described? I'm guessing yes, given you'd have been confused about something different otherwise?

Generally account balances don't come into it unless they're doing something particularly strange and think they're going to need a hospital-ship on standby for it to go even more wrong than usual. By the sounds of it you're viviparous? We're not, we're oviparous, which does rather make it logistically easier than what you're describing! Generally they're standardised enough to measure whatever they're trying to measure against other similar experiments - you can't run a true control group because a true control group would be people being raised the ordinary way by a family-unit, and obviously the variance on that is enormous. And generally the hypothesis is 'we can raise children more efficiently this way and their life outcomes won't be significantly worse than a traditional upbringing', although obviously different people pick different outcome metrics.

Yes, the idea of us being here as experts is to work out what areas we need to exchange techniques-and-technology on, and then we can start collaborating properly! Swapping personnel might be the most efficient way to bridge some of the bigger gaps, though, and Jupital will know more about who might be available and how many we could accomodate."

Jeeee to Ikkeh (and incidentally nearby Tetratopians) re Retirement

"...when someone can't work any more, or can work a bit but needs to be looked after? Like, sometimes just for the moment, sometimes it lasts the rest of their life?"

Talaskai to Kriv & Ect re aging, demographics

"Like, I think the very oldest get to see a hundred? I'm sixteen.

There's about..."

Ferek to Kriv & Ect re aging, demographics

...at which point Ferek does not quite fly over to the conversation, but certainly kis wings are out and there is considerable haste.

There is a quantity of frantic-speed trilling and chirping which the Kastakian translators decline to help anyone with, but might be approximately interpreted as "did you hear how many of them there are do not give any specific population numbers do you understand me" from Ferek and "you're not my real mom! no I do not want to go outside yes I'll behave" from Talaskai.

Talaskai to Kriv & Ect re aging, demographics

Talaskai shakes out ruffled feathers and makes an odd nasal noise which is akin to a big sigh.

"We haven't really tried trailing wires everywhere! I think people might feel kind of tied down to be physically connected, like it's a waste if they go out of range or something? Like, big installations like the salmon farms have lots of wiring that ties everything together?

Oh dear, have I been scary? I don't mean to be very scary, not like," ke glares at Ferek, who has backed off a little but is still clearly surveilling kim, "some people.

Uh, endeavour-group is - when you have a lot of people get together to achieve something specific? Like, anything that can't be run by a friendship-group because it needs too many people or too specific people."

Meliashae on Infotech

"Oh, we don't have - like, germanium is mostly a theory, I think someone might have synthesised, like, laboratory quantities? And we think the silicon needs to be much purer than we've been able to manage in any quantity, either.

I expect a lot of things are bottlenecked by manufacturing! Discovering things is fun, putting together the first prototype is fun, producing things that people obviously need is satisfying, but we have a lot of trouble doing anything that's in the middle of that, where it's basically a solved problem but it's not clear who actually needs it yet? Sometimes it's someone's obsession and that's infectious enough to get enough people along to get it over that hump, but I think a lot of things probably languish in the middle there."

Eyyeh to Reren

Bodies. Ah, well, the rest of his species has doubtlessly already blown its cover anyway.

"Bodies - his drones were killed with him?

Did he express a desire, in life, to be frozen so as to eventually be unfrozen if possible?" +5sd, yet - only +5sd and able to warp these bizarre aliens' future to such an extent . . . Eyyeh doesn't know if Byway can take something so dangerous, if it's allowed to re-emerge before its time. There may have to be a societywide moral injunction against selling the remna functional cryonic revival, once Byway reaches that point.

"My lack of understanding goes deeper, here. How could one person arrange for those who traded and lived in ways that he dispreferred, be killed or marginalized, except for by playing within the game of the current society, which could not have itself affected the rules of that game? How did he effect this, materially. What, vaguely, would a day in the life of the Imperator-changing-the-world, look like?"

Eyyeh is drawing something blanker than blank. Somehow he has a feeling Reren's answer will only invite more questions. He wishes this science lesson could be happening under circumstances of less future-of-the-species stakes. 

Selno to Yompam

"The human genome has been pretty thoroughly plumbed for informational content, but of course that's still ongoing, and copies of the 'decoded' genome at various levels of completeness and detail are in pretty wide circulation in the biotech sphere, if that's what you mean?

Are they breeding experiments or just child-rearing experiments? Why do so many people try to find more efficient methods of childrearing? Is it prohibitively inefficient?" He looks sympathetic. "How long do Kastakian children stay dependent? With humans it's about 9 years on average. They're not totally cognitively mature at that point, and physically they're still less than half adult size, but by then parents no longer generally have to invest effort into caring for them, because they've fledged as independent participants in the economy.

Why can't your childrearing researchers just have their blinded assistants split their group of eggs up into one half that gets reared in normal family-units and one that isn't?

I'd love to talk to Jupital whenever ke's available."

Ikkeh to Jeeee

Ikkeh looks like he's about as horrified as he'd expected to be. "Oh.   . . . Your people spend some significant fraction of their lives under physiological-neurological conditions that terrible? Anti-senescence is probably even more high-return for y'all than it was for us."

Kriv & Ect to Talaskai

"No," says Ect, now looking slightly abashed and concerned, "no, I just meant Kriv finds your knowledgeability indimidating."

Now Ect is confused. "If it's too large to be run by a friendship-group, and if I'm hearing you right endeavor-group is something different from for-profit-company, then - how does it work? What force, if not camaraderie or profit-seeking, keeps it together and working for a unified goal?"

Kriv listens intently. Talaskai's stated age has not assuaged his insecurity on behalf of his species, but he makes an effort not to show this.

Lak to Meliashae

Lak blinks.

"That's true enough if you're talking about ideas, but once it's clear that many people will find something useful enough to buy, there's instantly a huge profit motive to be the first to scale it, and dominate the young market, so that you're consumers' default choice until and unless someone else subsequently starts obviously outperforming you.

Or there should be. Is there - some reason that doesn't happen in Kastakia? I'd ask if Kastakians were rational enough consumers that sharp returns to dominating young markets in particular don't exist, but that would hardly explain Kastakian technologies getting scaled slower than obvious potential-for-profit . . ."