This story is a conversation, and I like it for that. Four scientists sit at a table in a spaceship that is ordinary and extraordinary at once, the way a kitchen can be both. Outside the window the Sun is dying. Inside, they sip excellent Martian beer, red as the planet that brewed it, and talk.
I enjoy the contrast. The great decisions of civilizations are seldom made in parliamentary halls. More often they ripen in informal conversations among people who know how to think beyond established patterns.
Solutions are plentiful at that table. The shortage is of language. Each scientist describes the same idea inside a different conceptual system, and for a long while they take one another for opponents.
It happens to us as well, and I suspect more often than any catastrophe from space. The future gets lost between two people who mean the same thing and cannot hear it.