Elfthreads!

[Moriwen]

+100 would read

(Bonus points if Melian & Thingol are still around being completely horrified at everything Telkam does.)

[Bluelantern]

+1000 would read

[Ezra]

I too would read that! Maybe we need an interdimensional visitor who'll nudge things in that direction.

Speaking of Telkam, he doesn't seem content with his family being all the colors, he's well on his way to being all of them personally. He's done extensive work in blue, green, yellow, and gray already. More than halfway there.

[DanielH]

What would Telkam do if a foreign blue saw his laws about caste and dyed their hair green to immigrate? What if they did not keep up the dyeing when they got there?

[lintamande]

Depends whether he liked them. If they annoyed him he'd have them deported.

[DanielH]

Oh, good, I was hoping for a native Bell in Amenta’s world.

[Ezra]

Imagine someone invents a new medical treatment which causes small children, even babies, to grow rapidly to adulthood. Imagine that when asked, children old enough to respond mostly say that yes, they'd want this, and this preference is consistent into their new adulthood.

Should you give this treatment to children? Or is something immeasurable and irreplaceable lost when you just skip past childhood?

This is how I would attempt to explain the Federation's stance on the Prime Directive to Amentans.

[DanielH]

I don’t think the metaphor of giving warp == skipping childhood is valid, but that does sound like a reasonable metaphor for the Federation’s stance.

Then again, it might not be a good one for Amentans, because then they’d no longer have their chocolate fudge.

[Adelene]

I think the bit where for childhood every individual by default gets a whole one, whereas generally individual people experience either a pre-warp civilization or a post-warp one but not both, is a relevant difference. Most people aren't history buffs, and I don't expect 'living in a post-warp society that was around for ten thousand years before it developed it' to be significantly different than the same thing but five or fifteen thousand years, for people who aren't. (I don't think the childhood thing would be wrong to do, either, just that the metaphor doesn't hold up very well.)

[jalapeno_dude]

...is it twelve years because of the book/movie?