"No-one's intentionally changed how things evolve. I don't think anyone would know how."

   "Do you mean, plants changing in a way like it might be other-world-people steering their evolution? I don't think so."

      "Dogs are really good and the Au-E-Na say they only evolved that way very recently?"

"Oh, I should mention to whoever's talking to the Au-E-Na that they'll want to ask about dogs, that's interesting... Not like other world people steering, exactly, but like there being a template things are evolving toward, which would match the longer-term evolution in worlds with similar species."

"A template?"

"Is it kind of decided in advance how things will evolve, and if so, how is that decided? I don't necessarily expect we'll figure this out today, of course."

"Well, things evolve in the same direction here as in other places even though they don't evolve for the same reason, right? So there must be something connecting us."

"Yes. I think probably it has to do with the Earth biosphere - there are a lot of planets with the same species even if they aren't the same sort of planet with the same shapes of land on them, for some reason."

"Hmm. Could that normally be because the same things help plants or animals have children in different situations? Where do species come from in the first place?"

"Usually a species becomes more species when parts of its population are isolated from each other somehow, by distance or a change in geography, and then they wind up specializing differently from each other. If you repeat that enough times you can wind up with very different organisms."

And two populations never change the same way, except when they're in two different Earth biospheres?

Nelen will go on a little tangent about convergent evolution, but yeah pretty much, that would be staggeringly unlikely.

Hmm. That does seem mysterious.

"You've told us about Vanda Nosseo as a whole is like, but what are your particular communities like? Who's in them, how do they do things, how did they live before Vanda Nosseo and how do they live now?"

Nelen can show them a picture of his house! He lives here with his aunt and some other people from his subculture (on his home planet it was very different from the others and they mostly did not want to live with the rest after they had more places to go).

Cassiel can show them the cave-town where she lives in Heaven. It has wide, tall avenues for people to fly in and the buildings all reach top to bottom, clinging on both sides to the cloud-fluff. It's all riotously colorful. Before she died she lived on Earth, here is a picture of the suburb where she grew up.

Zanro declines to produce pictures but will give the highest level gloss of what the heck an orc is.

Tarwë has pictures of Valinor, and where he lives now in Ambaróna when he's home!

Natsuko lives in this little shoebox Tokyo apartment; she could afford something bigger but she's so seldom there, she just needs a place to sleep and keep some clothes.

Huh, Nelen's family only have the one camp, like the sea people? They don't travel with the rest of Vanda Nossëo?

And they have a shelter that covers their whole camp, and it's light inside? Cool. How much do those cost? Do they need to do anything special to keep it from getting smoky inside?

Not wanting to live around unpleasant subcultures (like the Kau-Ba): sensible

The angel city is pretty. Howcome Cassiel's family didn't summon her back to Earth?

They're glad the orcs are free now, it's horrifying that they had to go through all that. And it's good that Melkor's dead now.

Having a shelter that's just for sleeping because you spend most of your time elsewhere: sensible. It still looks pretty big and luxurious, actually.