the midnight aesthetic

thank you, those are some very… good primary sources

My biggest recommendation is to pace yourself. There’s a lot to absorb, but it’s not going to tip the balance of any kind of high-stakes issue if you take a couple weeks or so to come to terms with it. It’s better to take your time so you don’t burn out. Set aside time to sort out your feelings, separately from doing research; and separately from that, set aside time to not think about the issue at all and just decompress.

Yes, it’s bad. But you don’t have to upend your whole life over it, and you’re allowed to take the time you need to stay grounded and sane.

I was going to stay in Voa because for me, at this point, having seasons and guaranteed children would outweigh not having to dye my hair in Miolee. And being close to my family, of course.

But potential red planet could have seasons and even if they do auctions or something there I would probably definitely be able to have many babies!!

So, this is unarguable ~proof~ that some degree of caste flexibility is the correct policy! Because without it, he could never have reached the stars!

I hope we are alone in the universe. Given how much of it exists that we haven’t explored, I think it’s unlikely. But I hope.

Our ideas of what–who–could be waiting for us among the stars are, I think, too amentancentric. We envision societies that look like ours, but people have black hair or three eyes, or they believe that causing someone’s death makes one polluted.

Who’s to say that alien lifeforms and cultures resemble ours at all? Maybe there are sentient clouds of gas that don’t make pollution because they have no physical bodies, and therefore have no concept of it. Maybe there are aliens that communicate by changing color, and a certain shade of blue hair is considered a terrible insult.

Maybe the aliens have a vastly different idea of what pollution is. Maybe they’ll see us all as being hereditarily polluted and fence us in somewhere because we’ve all been in contact with, say, wheat and wheat byproducts.

Anitam refused to comment during the ship’s initial foray on the nature of the test, but when the Beyond disappeared they asserted that this was an intended outcome - a test of an FTL drive developed by Anitami greens.  Anitam has asserted that they expect the ship to return, in six days, with close-up images of neighboring star Mahashikta and its planets.

The key insights associated with the “warp drive”, assuming this or a subsequent test is successful, are on offer from Anitam to countries who “successfully finesse” their red transitions, which was clarified to mean (among other criteria) without deaths of reds.  This applies retroactively, although Cene, not being held responsible for its protectorate Biyan, appears to have already struck a private deal for an early planet when some habitable options are found.  Miolee is also expected to be one of the first recipients after Anitam has found a colony world for itself.