"And reds?"

"Like I said, ideally we give them their own planet and maybe aid until they're self-sufficient. If terraforming each planet costs approximately the GDP of the whole world..."

"Then you murder them all so your grandchildren have clean hands."

"No, then we leave things as they are. If access to new planets requires pleasing some society who objects to the existence of reds and won't themselves take the reds or create somewhere for them to go, that's when there's a problem."

...sigh.

"There really aren't very many reds."

"There are countries that would kill just as many of some other caste if it were for some reason a condition of starships."

"That doesn't really help."

"You'd get volunteers. One in two hundred chance of death but your grandchildren will not suffer like this any longer - everyone would take that. You're interpreting this as 'we're unusually willing to kill innocent people' when it's instead that we are in much, much more pain than you can imagine."

...sigh.

"I think I'd tell those aliens that what they're doing is - finding people who are being tortured, asking them whether they'd kill someone to escape the torture, and then declaring they aren't worthy of no longer being tortured because they're hypothetically murderers."

"There's a difference between 'yes, I would do horrible things to make this stop' and 'yes, Steve, I hate that guy'."

"Some Amentan governments would do horrible things for starships. I hope I haven't left you with the impression we want to."

"That's - really not the level on which I'm observing a problem."

Sigh. 

"I'll probably wind up helping, just - I don't want the tone set to be that all your problems are solved as soon as you have ship blueprints. You have a crowded world and some very awkward social problems to introduce to the neighbors. It's not unheard of for people - I'm thinking of humans in particular, who you seem a lot like, less the obsession with children - it's not unheard of for humans to hear about neighboring humans doing something they can't countenance and invading to make it stop, and that's going to be a smaller gap. The guy I met first mentioned reds and wasn't even - embarrassed, cognizant that an alien would have a different reaction -"

...nod. "We'll keep in mind that it could inspire outrage and violence."

"You might want to - be underway on getting them their own planet, or whatever else seems like a suitably non-embarrassing acceptable long term solution, before you start trying to claim lots of other real estate."

"If people are just as likely to take offense about gay people - are they? - then we should probably anticipate we can't avoid such conflicts just by being consistent about living up to our own moral standards."

"- I think errors of permission are less likely to provoke invasions, generally. I wouldn't categorize that as an error but even if you meet someone more violent than Elves who objects it's harder to identify specific people on whose behalf they might be tempted."

"Are they likely to object to prisons?"

"Elves would. I don't know much about your neighbors."

She does not look super impressed with Elves. "We've got a province trying to do without, if the statistics shake out we could implement that elsewhere. I'd - really rather our social policy not be guided by the presumption our neighbors are itching for moral excuses for conquest but we can be flexibly organized so as to deemphasize or abolish whatever they object to. Unless they all want competing things."

"Mmhm."