What if they do this other much more intense thing?

(Lucien rewrites the description to be 80% less ... vivid)

The theologians can confer on this matter to try to determine if that will work but it is not an area with a well grounded current opinion on the matter and ideally it would simply never come up because they'd take showers now and then.

A bunch of amaliens take showers (or baths), it's the full decontamination showering that sounds difficult.

(Also there is an additional update from Vira attached, though he will note that they don't have to bother to read it if they don't think it's promising - he's pretty sure she is trying to figure out theology by brute force search over cleaning methods. This one is considerably more violent than the previous one and would probably require years of napping before a full recovery.)

Theologians need to spend a while thinking and debating and considering details of questions before they come to a consensus strong enough that it comes with the support of international law. They are not a Theology Calculator that can process questions instantaneously.

Vira is confused about why they haven't figured out more science about this thing that's very important to them! She's read their papers on it and they don't seem to be nearly as good as some of their other papers, have they tried talking to this ep-i-demiologist about it? He wrote some fun papers with pretty graphs about diseases correlations and under-lying hidden var-iables.

Lucien is not going to forward that, he's pretty sure that theology is not a science and that Vira attempting to treat it as such is not actually going to work, and might alienate the theologians.

He explains this to Vira a bunch until she understands what he means.

Actually she doesn't understand but she trusts Lucien and won't email the theologians herself. Though she does com-plain to a green science friend about it.

The marine biologist Vira befriended says that theology is more like political science than like, say, physics. There are still empirical things including disease prevalence to track, like "does democracy work" and "how much effect do various kinds of taxes have on things" in political science are kind of empirical, but the underlying moving parts are not elementary particles but people's intuitions which happen to have evolved for purposes like (in the case of political science) "guarding your material interests over the long term in a small socially interdependent tribe" or (in the case of pollution) "avoiding poisoning and infection when you don't know anything about biology". This doesn't make pollution unscientific, just fuzzier.

"You can still study in-tuitions though? By doing surveys and things. I once went 'round and asked all the amaliens which of a bunch of things was 'soft' so I could fi-gure out what 'soft' meant to amaliens."

Sure, that's also a tool in pollution theology, insofar as the marine biologist understands it, but survey design and implementation and analysis takes time.

But once you do 'nough you can us'lly start pre-dicting the res-ults of the surveys, right? She also does a bunch of that for things she wants to know, cause finding and talking to all the amaliens takes a while since some are in very hard to reach places.

Presumably there are some obvious questions that nobody has to bother actually investigating ("cannibalism: yes or no?") but that doesn't mean that totally novel situations ("indestructible aliens living with reds for many years without showering and then putting themselves through an irradiated autoclave: yes or no?")

Oh what she meant is that if you ask 'nough questions you can start pred-icting the answers using patterns, even when the questions are pretty comp-licated. 

(Also cannibalism does sound pretty ob-vious but it would still be good to do science to make sure people think that if you're trying to be really careful about the science.)

Sometime later Vira encounters discussion on the internet of the red col-onization.

After crying for a bit, she does the math herself to check the expected mortality rates for the migrating reds, accounting for the speed of the the migration, the somewhat minimla supplies, and the lack of expertise.

Then she does the math for what if lots of amal-iens went to help. ... she also checks how many mar-ginal amaliens going there and helping it would take to save a life.

She presents the results to other amaliens.

[Continued in never forget, always forgive]