It's interesting how these species mostly look so similar.

"Yes. There's some research on it. I think they think somebody a very very long time ago might have seeded a bunch of worlds, but they haven't conclusively decided, and most of the relevant species have a fossil record of evolutionary descent, so it's not wholly satisfying as an explanation."

The locals have such a fossil record! They have also found him an agriculture guy who will be happy to talk crop yields and where all the food goes in what quantities.

Oh good. He writes it down on his computer and says the delivery should be in a few hours and here are a bunch of technology summaries formatted already for local computing, if they care to publish or disseminate or otherwise get to work on them - "it's not my personal area of expertise, but if you want help in interpreting things I can have people stop by."

They appreciate that! They figure out how to pass around the summaries to the right people.

Other summaries: infrastructure! Transportation! High-density construction! More sophisticated computers! The math for warp travel! The standards for membership in the Vanda Nossëo interstellar consortium, which include no extrajudicial executions and no executions of children and the following standards for prison conditions and universal access to education and health care. And equality under the law, which as written doesn't strictly prohibit a caste system but does prohibit laws that apply only to certain subgroups of a society unless they pass in a democratic vote by a majority of the whole society and the majority of the affected subgroup and come up for vote again every four local years.

The blue-haired people frown thoughtfully at that but don't seem to have anything to say about the membership requirements. They are interested in the other stuff, though, and remark approvingly on how it will allow relaxed population controls.

"It sounds like you would be good candidates for another planet to colonize. Most species don't have need for population controls, and their enforcement inherently involves measures it'd be much better to avoid given an alternative."

"Maybe other species don't tend to want as many children? Most of us would have at least five if we had unlimited places to put them."

"Orcs are like that, and they've colonized six or seven planets accordingly. Most species with reliable birth control have replacement birth rates, or sometimes even lower."

"Our birth control works fine, it's just the first kid gets to be two and people want another one..."

"It sounds like you also live longer than lots of species which aren't immortal by default, many of them have a fertility window such that a kid every two of your years would only get them three in total - two if they started after secondary education -"

"Oh, we're fertile till we're twenty, usually, but people tend to stop at five, sometimes six kids even if they don't have to - we have a credit system here, people can buy as many as they like if they can afford them."

"That's a clever way to do it, means that over the generations you'll get a genetic skew towards conscientious and productive people. How is it enforced?"

"Well, birth control is subsidized heavily - I think we have managed it so literally no one would ever be tempted to be careless for financial reasons - and abortions are available to anyone who falls through the cracks for some reason there."

"Available or mandatory?"

"We don't have anywhere near the surveillance we'd need to implement mandatory abortions for unauthorized pregnancies."

Nod. "Universal access to birth control is a very impressive accomplishment."

"Thank you!"

"What sort of resources could we get you to best serve your people?"

"We are so excited to get colonization underway. We have moon settlements but they scale badly and are more science outpost than habitat."

"Have you done a survey, do you know nearby uninhabited candidates for terraforming? - once there are portals the 'nearby' won't matter but those may still be five of your years out -"

"We have some in mind!" They can get him to this green astronomer to discuss that if he likes.

He'll dispatch someone. "This far from home terraforming is one of the most expensive and resource-intensive things we do - there are better resources for it locally - but I should be able to arrange it on the grounds that you're in unusually pressing need and will make very resourceful use of it. Projects like that are a major diplomatic commitment - if we're offering transit or en-route protection that's a sizable ongoing obligation - so we'll have people out here to write up a detailed agreement to everyone's satisfaction, though I can maybe anticipate their questions and advise you on ensuring the negotiations go smoothly."

"We don't have any observable neighbors that we know of, is protection likely to be a substantial concern?"