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Before you go on a multiple-year trip accessible only by hyperspace relay, you download every out-of-copyright-work of art, literature or science your civilization has ever produced and stick it on your ship's computer. You do this even if you are, frankly, kind of dumb; it is just the obvious thing to do. You are not going to think of everything you need, and no matter HOW confident you are that five-dimensional math is beyond you or that you have no interest in the works of Falazon-2114, some conceivable emergency might mean that you need to repair a damaged hyperdrive or persuade a colony founded on his works that they desperately need to join the League, and when it is essentially costless to take everything, that is what you do.
This, at any rate, is common knowledge known even to the pilot of the Finite But Extremely Large Bounty, whose true name is a thirty-six digit hexadecimal string and whose usename incorporates sounds found not only not in English, but not in any language spoken by dogs, chimpanzees, mosquitoes, or any other entity that does not prefer to communicate exclusively via signal broadcast. We can call him Nau, or Fodion, or GODDAMN IT, since these are all noises he is going to make very, very soon.
Not that any emergency has hit. No, he's had a peaceful trip; no need to exercise self-control, no need to make decisions calling for twice his intelligence, just regular drop-offs of signal beacons to mark his progress and slightly less regular placement of mining replicators on the occasional unusually valuable asteroid; when the pickup ship comes in his wake, it will find the asteroids neatly sorted into their component materials, all carefully packaged and floating by the beacons for immediate delivery to the nearest orbital factory. He's been being choosier than most miners would, with his beacons, but the whole point of taking a job mining asteroids is so you can generate positive value for the world without ever having to interact with any part of it that is not best primarily understood with reference to Newtonian motion, and the longer his trip, the more he can stay in his cabin, reading books written when the League's average IQ was three standard deviations lower than it is today and even mostly following them.
And as long as no emergency hits, that's exactly what he's going to be able to keep doing. He sets his hyperdrive going and -
I'm not sure. You're the only alien I've ever met. I don't know if putting us on a moon would even work very well. It would be expensive and wouldn't work well for anyone who was too young to turn into a cyborg.
I'm sorry, I had completely misunderstood the direction of your arguments, due to being an alien. I had thought of 'an inability to replicate seasoning' as a problem, not as a possible gain? I don't know which it is or what the constraints are on moon colonies.
If we go somewhere without seasons, we get stuck in spring. If we don't season at all, because we're cyborgs, that might be okay.
Ah.
I do not know what would happen. Humans do not have a mating season, and although I am sure we have analogous problems, I do not know how we solved them.
I'm just a news blogger in my spare time, I don't know how to make plans like this really.
And I'm a mining engineer.
I don't suppose you know any competent experts who have the required skills to plan to save a civilization and don't want to wipe out your entire caste?
Understandable. But the limiting factor on what I can do for you is my ability to see the world through your eyes, not my ability to manufacture alien wonders. Anything that helps me know more, I need.
And if his hopeful-new-ally is going off to find him a contact, probably his next step is to double-check that caste mobility (or "reform", or, heck, "abolition") really isn't a thing. Using the power of the internet!
It super is not a thing people do in real life, except for one buried remark in the history of Ereith about how they fixed their caste balance when the settlers were too grey, not enough red, and generally skewed.
People do talk about caste reform, though. Respectable positions include dual-casteing more occupations, loosening up caste limitations for mixed kids, or increasing the out of caste income cap. Edgier opinions include only requiring credit money, specifically, to be earned in-caste, or outright allowing caste swaps the way immigration allows national swaps. Radical opinions include caste abolition... though even those people don't seem to have reds in mind.
!@#$. He can't convince them to abolish their caste system (he isn't superintelligent) and he can't even convince them to loosen it (he isn't intelligent). So... what can he do?
Well, he can try to brute force it with science.
In that case, it's probably time to go back to his blue and green handlers! Specifically, he's first go send the Him-Studying Greens corpus links to books on mechanization of farming, genetic engineering of crops, and high-tech fertilizers (in the hopes that more population growth will make Amentans generally happier), and then *sigh* check in with Tashi Tosuk. Have any crises come up before he does that that he needs to know about?
No crises have come up, Tosuk assures him. No other secret projects have been disrupted, the ag scientists are very happy about having stuff to do that's involved in the excitement, and also there's a TV show in the works adapting one of Nau's fiction recommendations, if that's the sort of thing that interests him.
... He's going to keep a loose eye on the TV show production, just to see how horrible it will be, but he really doesn't think he has time to be a cultural consultant. Maybe he can recommend them a few supporting books for context in case they wildly misinterpret something? Recommending books is not all that hard, not when he's spent most of his life reading. And if there are any other bored scientists he might be able to point at something useful?
And, uh.
Is it worth getting me in touch with a theologian? I don't think I understand pollution well enough to know what problems my attempted solutions to the red problem might cause, and I'd like to learn enough to head the problems off as far in advance as I can.
I can have you sent a theologian! Are you interested in anything else about the field or just pollution theology?
I expect I should learn more about the field as a whole, but right now my primary interest is pollution theology, since that's important to the only potential crisis currently on my desk.
All right, you should have a theologian in the pack of greens orbiting you by this time tomorrow.
Excellent, thank you.
Well, while there's still some today left, does the pack of greens need anything?
The pack of greens tell him that the xenobiologists would like some highlights so they can learn about alien animals and plants and stuff.
(There aren't any alien a-)
Right. Sure. He can track down a few books on... vaguely related topics?
(He has no very good idea, but he has seen animals at some point and he has a search function!)
Great! He'll continue trying to answer questions for greens and solve metallurgical problems until someone gets back to him on a more urgent topic.
(And sleep. He should spend a few minutes on that, at some point.)
Check the email first, in case it's an emergency, then ask questions of the theologian, then go 'spend a while thinking about it' (probably do some of that) and talk to the red community organizer while he does. Unless the email turns out to be urgent, of course.
The email just says Do I have the correct address? I was referred by ticker_squirrel.