An average dath ilani will probably be offended if you describe Merrin as 'low in mental stats' because the sole point of mental stats is what you do with them, and Merrin is a very accomplished person thanks to her sheer diligence, despite whatever standardized tests say about some below-average components of her thinkoomph.

(This intuitive sense from Cultural Adaptation is not going to come through with that precision, just, 'You wouldn't put it THAT way about a very accomplished and famous person like Merrin, stats aren't everything' and distinctly not 'Lol no of course her stats are high, you just don't talk about that part with her'.)

A past, smarter Merrin thought it was a good idea for alternate-Estha to have his headband back and be more capable of self-reflection and stuff, and also had a weird amount of confidence in her own ability to find some way out of this stupid situation that outperforms either of "the two of them eventually starve to death on the exoplanet" and "she finds a way to send alternate-Estha back to the doomworld timeline", which is from Merrin's point of view very suboptimal EVEN IF she somehow makes a deal where they leave her behind and slightly better off than she was before Estha appeared in front of her. Because he was her patient and she doesn't want him to be TORTURED FOREVER IN THE DOOMWORLD AFTERLIFE.

(She has, rightly or wrongly, been assuming that even the version he thinks is a better deal than he would get otherwise - the reward for being so dedicated to his doomworld doomgod job - is still something that any sane dath ilani would conclude could be described accurately as "being tortured forever" and therefore a very bad outcome.) 

(And it is, of course, not impossible that "Aspexia Rugatonn" shows up without Merrin having made any kind of deal for herself, in which case things do not go well for Merrin at all and there's close to nothing she can do about it.) 

- not dwelling on that now. Power of dissociation. No feelings about Hell. Having feelings about Hell in front of alternate-Estha would be MAKING THINGS WEIRD and thus a terrible terrible outcome. 

Merrin can explain with compete honestly her own best guess of why it would help to have dath ilan in touch with them. Reaching them with either a frantic FTL-space-travel (or ??interplanar?? ??space travel??) research project probably would take dath ilan a while even with their resources, but in the meantime if they had any communication bandwidth they could tell Merrin how to survive on the exoplanet. She's good at her Exception Handling specialty. She's a lot better at it with expert backup. 

...Also, what's 'spellsilver'? If it's a kind of metal then dath ilan has pretty advancement refinement technology for metal ores. Merrin herself in her own brain only has some of that but she's probably supposed to believe in her own ability to Figure It Out or something. 

(A much reduced and squished-down Laeirthe is smugly noting that it DOES kind of sound like there's a type of magic accessible with thinkoomph alone! Neat! ...Does Merrin's Shared vocabulary in fact have any words for kinds of magic that don't specifically rely on gods?) 

Esta is sort of half-listening to this and half-querying Cultural Adaptation about what is either a real place, or, alternatively, an Outer God weaving something out of dreamstuff that intercepts a first-circle divination spell and feeds it false but consistent answers.

Suppose the mythic archmage Nex were in dath ilan.  How does he rate for mental stats?  Assuming he's got 5 Wishes on Cunning, a +6 headband, and started at 19.

Cultural Adaptation can't convert numbers, but intuitively Cunning in the range of 30 sounds way above average, yeah.

...how's his Wisdom.

...probably not as bad as Geb's must have been, but definitely not 30?  Say he's got a couple of Wishes on that, started at 14, and has +6 from a +6 Headband of Mental Perfection.  That'd make Nex as Wise as Esta wearing this headband, which for Golarion is usually considered quite impressively Wise --

He could make a decent specialized researcher but you wouldn't want him at the top of a research project or anything.

...in a serious fight between dath ilan and Cheliax, who wins?

Dath ilan would not get into a fight with a Golarion faction!  Golarion lacks the industrial capacity to engage in a fight with dath ilan!  Seriously attacking Golarion would be sad, and mean.

...what happens if a flight of ancient black dragons attacks dath ilan's center of Governance?

Oh no!  We must quickly do something!  Diplomacy!  Loudspeakers!  People might truedie!  Those poor black dragons!

What actually happens to the black dragons?

Thin, hot, black dragon vapor.

Tar-Baphon.  You know, that guy who promptly died to Aroden, which turned out to be all part of Tar-Baphon's plan, but did force Aroden to actually materialize in order to fight him seriously.  Can command infinite undead via some never-duplicated trick that the gods would not permit to be duplicated.

Ohhhh that's tricky, enemy-can-command-your-guys, mind-control stuff.  Sounds like an Alien Invasion Rehearsal Festival.  In real life the Keepers would be running that one.

(This comes across imprecisely, a sense of "dath ilan rehearses this scenario on an annual basis and Tar-Baphon doesn't win".)

Esta is starting to see why a primordial inevitable would enclose dath ilan in a planet-sized antimagic field, or throw their planet into a dead magic plane.  If such a place actually exists and they are not just culturally very very very overconfident.

The other half of his mind is trying to explain spellsilver to Merrin.  Dense metal, a seventh part lighter than iron perhaps once refined, tarnishes in air so rapidly that it will turn into ash within hours or days unless you keep it immersed in oil, very expensively purified with strong acids from a yellow-brownish sand found on seashores.

It's really surreal for Merrin's future and possibly the future of trillions of souls currently being tormented by the doomgod in the doomworld timeline to depend on exactly how much basic metallurgy Merrin can dredge out of her brain from school, but uhhhh hmmm a seventh part lighter than iron, tarnishes rapidly in air, that feels like it should definitely narrow it down a bunch - 

- OR ACTUALLY Merrin is very silly. Because she has a handheld X-ray spectrometer. 

It works like so, it's non-magical and uses very high energy light to sort of - jostle the very tiny indivisible-components of a substance, to make them briefly contain more energy, and when that energy falls out again it re-emits high-energy light of a particular, uh, color, that humans can't actually perceive, but her nonmagical device can, and will if she points it at his ring be able to tell her exactly what indivisible-components it contains. It's not damaging– correction, it wouldn't damage a metal sample for any use she could put a metal to, it won't alter the structure or composition, she would be very surprised if it damaged the ring's ability to be magical? 

...sure.

...In his position Merrin would take the ring off and analyze it with her hand not in the X-ray beam - and if she recalls correctly this one isn't the ring that takes a week to work again? - but it's proobably not a huge deal for one quick analysis, if he would rather not take it off, it's a pretty small {radiation} exposure. 

You know what, sure, he'll stick his ring finger in the machine.  You don't level by not taking risks, he's got a Heal chambered, sometimes people pick up weird abilities by exposure to uh actually this is possibly Dark Tapestry Outer-God-touched dreamstuff isn't it.  Nevermind he'll take off the ring and hand it over.

Point. Wait like thirty seconds for the readout. (She would want to analyze a sample longer to, say, figure out the exact ratio of carbon to hydrogen to sulfur to oxygen etc etc, or detect trace uranium, but the primary analysis should be fast.) 

What kind of metal(s) are in this ring, by dath ilan's periodic table? 

Broadly speaking, spellsilver is 95%-purity lanthanides, almost entirely cerium / element 58; often clad in gold (element 79) or platinum (element 78) to avert corrosion.

But one of the reasons that Rings are difficult to make, and require a separate feat, is that they are so light as to have trouble containing a reasonable amount of material for stabilizing the magic in them.

One kilogram of spellsilver ought to cost no more than five years' wages for a 3rd-circle wizard, whose weekly wage might be in the range of 30gp.  5 * 52 * 30 ~ 7500gp per kilo of spellsilver.

A ring granting a +3 competence bonus to a skill check might cost ~1200gp, of which 900gp materials, 200gp markup and the cost of protecting magical inventory from theft, and 100gp to pay a talented 4th-circle to work on it for a week.

A typical ring also weighs 5-10 grams, and 900gp / 120 grams of spellsilver will not really fit in one.  So the price of a ring cannot be because it is made up of 120 grams of spellsilver.

What's actually going on here is more that it takes 80 grams of spellsilver to make the ring, but the magic of 75 grams of that spellsilver gets burned into 5 grams of spellsilver (cerium, element 58), laced with a seventh of a gram of starmetal (osmium, element 76), which is typically bought off-planet from the City of Brass and costs as much as 40 grams of spellsilver.  And then all of that is clad in 2 grams of platinum (element 78).

This will ultimately give Merrin the correct answer if she goes by the dominant metal in the ring by weight, though.

…Huh.

Well, it’s not the platinum, that doesn’t tarnish in air.

“That’s interesting,” Merrin says. “The primarily metal component is {cerium}, or {element 58} by our categorization. This planet has a lot of it, actually?" Via the same process that resulted in higher concentrations of uranium, which was a lot more relevant to her life before now. "I mean, not conveniently in pure metallic form, but some of the tidal plants have a high concentration of cerium oxide, I figured for {ultraviolet} protection. There's also a bunch of {monazite}," Merrin may have been BORED and pointed her X-ray spectrometer at random rocks about it more than was strictly necessary, "but there are extra steps starting from that, I think you want to process it to {cerium oxide} anyway and go from there? But if we're starting from the {oxide} it's...hmm... do I have... okay, yeah, I'd need to go look at some reference material but I think I could figure out refining the pure metal with what I have already. Not at {industrial scale} and it'd be labor-intensive," and she would proooobably destroy a bunch of her equipment for any other use if she had to adapt it for improvised molten salt electrolysis, it would definitely be PREFERABLE if they still had the [Greater Make Whole] spell available afterward, and of course mucking around with concentrated hydrochloric acid and stuff on your own on another planet is not a great idea without magic healing, "but at least it's not as annoying a project as building a {computer} from scratch." 

Shrug. "...I don't know if that actually helps us? It sounded like you would need someone instructing you on what to do with it. But I probably could, if it were a step in another plan." 

(Merrin is verbally putting in uncertainty-qualifiers - less precisely than she would if she were mostly speaking Baseline, but Merrin's brain is tired and she is maybe very slightly appreciating a language that is less cognitive effort to generate sentences in, even if she feels like she SHOULD find it obnoxious. Anyway, her tone is a lot less uncertain than it would be if smarter Merrin had not been so weirdly confident that whatever the solution to her problems turned out to be, she would be able to figure it out.) 

"Is this the sort of thing we could also use as a test to verify how much of dath ilan's knowledge is real?  As in, there's a way to do it just like how a cartwright carves a wheel, without key steps relying on equipment that, hypothetically speaking, an Outer God could've woven from dreamstuff to perform arbitrary tasks?"