Could there be a relatively peaceful solution to the shard problem?

[Cilia]

I think the original proposition involved a gradual tapering-off. No new life would be born on the worlds, and all existing life would live out their existence until natural death. No one would be asked to give up their life - just their potential for children. As for history and cultures, those could still be preserved through historical records and such, just as lost cultures are (sometimes) preserved under ordinary circumstances.

All this, of course, would STILL be a very hard sell. Which is why I remarked a while back that if we had the potential for this, we'd basically be living in a utopian society already.

Still, after seeing what the ancients used to have, I think it's quite likely that there would be more than a few pepole pushing for this if it could be done gently. (And a few, like Varis, who would push for it regardless...)

The issue with a slow burnout of life is that it's absolutely horrible. It's even less humane than just blowing the place up. If you stop all new life from coming into existence, that will quickly kill off livestock, who if not slaughtered for meat have a shorter lifespan than people (spoken races) anyway. Plant life will gradually die out as well. Eventually people will have nothing to eat; this "gentle Rejoining" does nothing but doom people to death via starvation in a few years.

Without a logistical solution to transporting any record of the shard worlds, making them is pointless.

The only people who would push for Rejoinings, gradual or otherwise, are those who believe they would personally benefit from them - as Alisae suggests Varis only thinks Rejoinings are acceptable because he believes that he'll be the one at the top in the very end (and implicitly that Garlemald will make it out relatively unscathed). Unless there were a crisis of untold proportions necessitating the shards give up their existence and they were doomed beyond a shadow of a doubt anyway, absolutely nobody would agree to this.

Except for the literal end of the world nothing justifies genocide, much less omnicide. (inb4 "Hydaelyn genocided the Ancients!": yes, and it was wrong of her, but it's unclear whether that was deliberate on her part and it still doesn't justify the Ascians deliberately trying to omnicide / genocide the shard worlds and Source, respectively.)