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Before you go on a multiple-year trip accessible only by hyperspace relay, you download every out-of-copyright-work of art, literature or science your civilization has ever produced and stick it on your ship's computer. You do this even if you are, frankly, kind of dumb; it is just the obvious thing to do. You are not going to think of everything you need, and no matter HOW confident you are that five-dimensional math is beyond you or that you have no interest in the works of Falazon-2114, some conceivable emergency might mean that you need to repair a damaged hyperdrive or persuade a colony founded on his works that they desperately need to join the League, and when it is essentially costless to take everything, that is what you do.
This, at any rate, is common knowledge known even to the pilot of the Finite But Extremely Large Bounty, whose true name is a thirty-six digit hexadecimal string and whose usename incorporates sounds found not only not in English, but not in any language spoken by dogs, chimpanzees, mosquitoes, or any other entity that does not prefer to communicate exclusively via signal broadcast. We can call him Nau, or Fodion, or GODDAMN IT, since these are all noises he is going to make very, very soon.
Not that any emergency has hit. No, he's had a peaceful trip; no need to exercise self-control, no need to make decisions calling for twice his intelligence, just regular drop-offs of signal beacons to mark his progress and slightly less regular placement of mining replicators on the occasional unusually valuable asteroid; when the pickup ship comes in his wake, it will find the asteroids neatly sorted into their component materials, all carefully packaged and floating by the beacons for immediate delivery to the nearest orbital factory. He's been being choosier than most miners would, with his beacons, but the whole point of taking a job mining asteroids is so you can generate positive value for the world without ever having to interact with any part of it that is not best primarily understood with reference to Newtonian motion, and the longer his trip, the more he can stay in his cabin, reading books written when the League's average IQ was three standard deviations lower than it is today and even mostly following them.
And as long as no emergency hits, that's exactly what he's going to be able to keep doing. He sets his hyperdrive going and -
Assuming that ticker_squirrel was the right person, then the answer is Yes, I think so, I'm the mining engineer.
Unfortunately, there will be a slight delay in responding to the email due to him having a conversation with this person's evil counterpart.
In essence, the conversation is: Pitch me on what pollution is, I've read about it on your internet but I don't intuit it and have lots of weird edge questions.
The theologian is happy to explain to him that pollution is an evolved instinct geared towards preventing the spread of disease which has been modernized into a more fully developed social technology, the same way that, for example, love is an evolved instinct to cohere families and communities and property rights are a social technology to let people live together. What are the weird edge questions?
Hmm. That makes sense.
His weird ones include:
If you touch a polluted thing with the tip of your finger, your fingertip is polluted. Presumably, objects you touch with that fingertip are polluted. How deep does this go? If you could remove the skin on your finger one molecule thick, would that remove the pollutant, or does it have depth? Do more polluted things have more depth or is this completely the wrong way to think about it? Can polluted things transfer pollution to other things in circumstances under which they could not transfer germs?
Amentans were worried that he was polluted, because his civilization has only a very weak pollution instinct. He explained that his body and ship were both sterilized at sufficient temperatures to kill germs before he landed on Amenta. Are there situations where that would not be enough to deal with pollution? Should he be doing something fancier?
Presumably spilled blood is polluted. Is it polluted inside the body, or only after it is shed?
His civilization can synthesize duplicate living tissue. Questions:
If you synthesized parts of living things that could not survive on their own, would they immediately be polluted, or only become polluted through natural decay? Could you, for instance, create a duplicate arm that could not survive on its own to graft onto someone who'd lost his arm, or would the graft be polluted before it could be applied?
If you synthesized a child with the DNA of red parents out of completely clean components without ever using any molecules from reds, only information, would the child be born polluted as red children are?
If you created a clean substance that functioned as blood inside the body but had no dangerous infectious properties outside it, would it still be polluted?
(And he's going to toss in a few more random ones, just to add even more disguise to the important ones.)
Pollution doesn't have a fixed depth. The skin on your finger isn't perfectly smooth, so removing a one molecule layer of it isn't well-defined; one skin layer would do the trick, if you did it in a sufficiently neat way (so, not like peeling a fruit, because no way of peeling a fruit totally eliminates the risk that contaminants will be moved to the inside of the fruit by the peeling process). In practice, you can just wash your hands, to the wrist to leave lots of margin for error and very thoroughly. A lot of definitions of what has to be treated as polluted is actually about margin of error.
The theologian is pretty sure he read a paper once about transmitting pollution under sterile conditions but cannot actually remember what the case was. It's not impossible in principle but it'd be hard to come up with the conditions for it in practice.
High temperatures do the trick, as long as he came up to temperature all through and there's no risk he's got a pocket of pollution internally somewhere that wasn't covered he's fine.
Spilled blood is actually not polluted! Some old cultures thought it was, old cultures thought all kinds of things, but in the modern day it's understood that when blood leaves the body it's not because there's something wrong with the blood itself except in very rare specific cases, it just is not mechanically held in like it's supposed to be if someone's injured. Tears and sweat are also not pollutants because they are not being rejected by the body as waste products and are produced for other reasons. Mucus and earwax are not pollutants inside the body, but are if they build up - wanting to remove something from yourself because your nose is running or your ear itches is not not a kind of rejection, though layperson messaging tries not to push that because sometimes that sort of thing makes hypersensitives try to scrub off all their skin.
Synthesized tissue would not be polluted! Quite possibly not even through natural decay! An amputated limb, presuming it's not oozing pus or something, is not necessarily polluted; one that hasn't been attached yet needn't be either.
If for some reason you created a child like that the child would be clean, though probably have all kinds of other problems since reds are shaped for an awfully specific niche and their genomes will reflect that.
Blood is, as mentioned, not polluted. A substance like that might still be interesting for other reasons though.
Hmm. He finds all this interesting!
Technically his brain might be polluted but his brain is only interfacing with anything outside of it via electrical impulses and heat, but his brain is in a nigh-impenetrable case and the outside of it was heated to very high temperatures.
Huh! He would have guessed spilled blood was. He finds all these statements interesting! He had a lot of misunderstandings about pollution!
He's somewhat curious about red shaping. He hadn't realized that Amenta had genetic engineering; was this just selective breeding?
Selective breeding, yeah. Especially in credit countries, success at a particular caste's niche will improve one's ability to be part of the next generation.
If his brain were a primary pollutant (NOT that the theologian is suggesting this) and it is in physical contact with the case, the case might be polluted, but in most cases you wouldn't need to worry about that, you'd just want another layer that is technically a separate object around that.
His body around the case is a separate object, so that suffices, yes. Good. Pollution is important to Amentans and he does not want to offend them.
(He is HOPING that the combination of his superior control over his physical form and his being an alien will make that last sentence sound like he believes it.)
Everything the theologian is making sense. Are there any other important theological things he does not know and should?
A lot of theology is stuff that Amentans wouldn't expect to translate well across species boundaries even as much as they expected pollution to - caste, some lifestyle advice stuff, that kind of thing.
That makes sense. His species does not really have caste; a few societies experimented with it in ancient history (which is how the word translates) but they did not keep it. Not surprising, since humans and Amentans are not the same species.
(firedeathfiredeathfiredeathfiredeath...)
Yup. Here is the theologian's email address in case Nau thinks of more questions!
Great! He'll email the theologian if he needs to.
Now, back to the red conversation...
I hope you can. As you know, I'm new here and have no idea how to get adapted. I'm mostly looking for basic concerns with my performance and simple information that anyone in my position would normally possess, but of course I also want to try to solve the main problem facing us if I at all can.
The logistics overhead of problems like this one tends to be enormous; you'll probably need some kind of help from people with preexisting credibility on the topic.
Yes, but being new here means I don't know any of them. I don't suppose there's anyone you know who could introduce me?
... Honestly he's kind of enjoying the spyspeak.
Unfortunately I don't get a lot of chances to meet people from out of my hometown. I can ask around if anyone has a referral. Do you have a general idea of what kind of logistics you're looking at, so I know what experience would be relevant?
... Okay, no, he's not sure how to break that code.
A... general idea of what kind of logistics he's looking at?????
Okay, well, he'll take his best stab at it.
I'm mostly interested in...
!@#$, now he needs to come up with his own code. Delete delete delete...
I'd ideally like to get buy-in from people who specialize in long-term planning, since the essential question is how I can make my actions meet your organization's overall strategic goal, but instruction in ground-level conditions might also be important - working in Tapa, I've only met a small subset of the affected people, if that, and I expect most of my sources don't have a very good picture of concerns outside their specific areas of expertise. I'd also expect that customer service or project evaluation people would also want an opportunity to chime in, to make sure my project does in fact satisfy your needs sufficient to allow reduction in or ideally even suspension of alternative means of achieving these overall strategic goals where these alternate means would interfere with long-term growth and expansion prospects for the global environment we find ourselves in, though I am of course aware that these growth prospects are very far from your highest priority.
There. That's nicely spy-speak-y. Hopefully it won't be too incomprehensible.
I appreciate the clarity, I wasn't sure you did. I'm an alien from another world who accidentally crashed here. I do not intuit pollution and my species does not have a caste system, and I want Amenta to get into space with no red massacres. I'm trying to figure out how I can get the clean castes not to kill reds, cancel red child credits, or attempt some kind of horrifying mass internment scheme, while getting Amenta to space, ending death from natural causes on Amenta, industrializing Amenta to galactic standards (I'm prepared to sacrifice this one) and not starting a planetary war. My civilization's actual diplomats can solve any remaining major problems when they get in touch with Amenta, but I want the help of red leadership in finding some kind of solution to the three critical mid-term problems.
Which I presently understand as "if the clean castes get robots, they will all kill you or cancel your child credits," "if I give you technology to help you, the clean castes will kill you or cancel your child credits," and "if they think you might get into space, the clean castes will kill you or cancel your child credits."
That's about the size of it, yes. I was trying to suggest that you might need clean sympathizers to get this accomplished worldwide.
Right. I was trying to say that I have no idea who they are and would appreciate introductions.
I know who some clean sympathizers are, but I don't know if they're any good at this kind of project. We mostly meet delivery purples and the occasional orange social worker or population observer yellow, and once in a while someone online. I don't know very much about how projects among cleans are done or what skills you'd need.
Do you know anyone who might know? I am an alien, I don't know how to read Amentan signals. If you can point me one link further down the chain - to anyone who's a sympathizer who knows other sympathizers who know what they're doing. I'd prefer it be a shorter chain if I can, since each stage is a risk of the conversation coming out and the blues I'm working with in Tapa concluding that I'm a caste abolitionist and should therefore be ignored, but I need Amentan buy-in and messaging random clean sympathizers does not look very safe to me.
Seriously, is there a public "humane treatment of reds" movement anywhere online he failed to find? Or is it just fringe teenagers? Or not even that?
Being known to be a sympathizer would easily be life-destroying. I don't think they tend to know each other. If this conversation comes out every red you've talked to will probably be killed.