"That's true."

"It seems likely that there already exists some treaties or rules or agreements discouraging newly spacefaring civilizations from bothering their neighbors - honestly, if there are that many neighbors, the fact no one has said hi itself maybe points to some agreement like that."

"I was not, however, counting only species with FTL. I was counting everybody."

"I was assuming the policies about bothering one's neighbors universal enough that they would explain why we've seen no signs of aliens."

"You don't know that. You don't know why you haven't been visited. And it's possible no one in your galaxy has in fact invented FTL at all. And my version would get you farther than that if you wanted."

"As long as there are empty planets anywhere we'll go for those."'

"What if you check five thousand planets and they are all full, are you going to check another five thousand?"

"We can check five thousand at once. Or perhaps some society has artificial gravity and we can build our own suitable planets. Or perhaps some society will sell land in exchange for vaccinations and computers and help getting the infrastructure base to sustain those. The kind of security one achieves by chaining societies to their home planets doesn't seem like the sustainable kind. We'll go meet our neighbors and figure out something better than that."

"That's a lot of perhapses. And if you say hi to the neighbors and it turns out that they have weird customs about corpses or fertilize their crops with feces..."

"- then we probably don't buy their food. It's a practical concern, not a moral one."

"You had a war over it in recent memory, I'm told."

"There are trade agreements which ensure reliable access to food for the countries which have to import it. A country secretly stopped abiding by them, leaving their neighbors starving; the neighbors took a province so they could have independent food security and then agreed to peace. If they'd had another means of feeding their people they would have taken it."

"Aliens are not likely to care about the same things in the same ways and anticipate the same distribution of possible fallout from diplomatic hiccups."

"We wouldn't expect them to. We will not rely on food from societies that don't care about pollution in the first place."

...sigh.

"He blew up a planet," says Sahan from the corner. "But we're not good enough for starships, noooo -"

       She is temporarily speechless. 

"Sahan, do you think you could give Mashal here an account of what happened, for our records -"

         "Maybe we can go somewhere private for that," says Mashal.

"That would be great." Sigh. "It - sounds like it might be worthwhile for us to learn more about each other before we make high-stakes decisions. I take it they're not even urgent, because of the magic door?"

"Yeah."

"How much background do you have about us?"

"Not that much. Fifteen minutes of conversation."

"That's hardly enough to decide whether to buy us lunch. Can we table that conversation for now?"

"If you want lunch I can make you lunch."

"I suppose you could. ...I had this absurdly delicious seafood plate once, the next time I went to the restaurant it wasn't on the menu, they said it was seasonal, what do you need to know to make things?"

"More than that. When was this? What was the menu item called, at what restaurant?"