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 -
Tapa is the most populous and largest by land area country in the world. They are big on international cooperation, hold several protectorates, had a fight with Voa over farm territory for independent food security a few seasons back but have resolved it since, kill babies as a population control deterrent as a holdover from when they avoided conquest by the Oahk Empire with this signal, speak Tapap and have a currency called the tap, and operate on a credit system.
Every nation on Amenta has to abide by population control restrictions and allow international observation to make sure they're doing it. Different countries decide who's allowed to have kids each year differently - there are three major system classifications with lots of little details - and Tapa does a credit system, but, unlike most credit countries, an unauthorized baby is euthanized rather than just confiscated and adopted out.
Since they apparently don't KNOW that, he is going to start looking up all the statistics on how every country on Amenta does things, and then he will SHOW them that their method is WRONG and BAD! What does the control group do?
(To clarify, by 'the control group' he means 'all the other countries that use a child credit system and don't kill babies.)
The other countries take the babies away from the unauthorized parents and allow someone on a waiting list to adopt the baby. They do actually have to do somewhat more of this per capita than Tapa does infanticide; it comes up in internet arguments.
See, those other countries are being much more reasonable. For instance, they are NOT KILLING CHILDREN.
... Okay, wait, wait, let's back up a bit. Why can only some people have children? Is there a competency examination, or something?
Well, a lot more people want to have children than would lead to a sustainable growth rate. They aren't doing things with exams per se in most places, but there are eugenic screens you have to pass or get some kind of exemption for, and in credit countries you need to win an auction, while in two-per countries you just have to stop at two and in permission countries you need to impress a blue.
But they're going to go to space. And have more planets. They don't need a sustainable growth rate, they just need not to LITERALLY STARVE UNTIL THEY GET TO SPACE. Then all growth rates will be sustainable. Because we are not going to run out of planets any time soon. At the least, they could stop killing children!
(Also, 'impress a blue', what.)
They had no immediate prospects of getting to space and did not know how long it was going to take them, so, population controls.
In permissions countries, such as much of the "Oahksphere" (places colonized by Oahk when it was an Empire), blues - usually specialists of some stripe - are in charge of distributing the limited number of child permissions per caste. Some of them just sell the permissions for money, which is more or less equivalent to credits, except that the supply of credits that are specifically on sale for money is smaller and out of reach for poorer families than it is in credit countries, so most people have to arrange in some other way to attract notice, or have their spouse attract notice.
Okay, well, they can stop murdering children over their population controls now that they have immediate prospects for getting to space. Hopefully that will make everyone happy. It's not like anyone WANTS to murder children.
(... But he's going to keep wiki-walking about the Oahksphere until the truck arrives or he gets bored.)
The Oahk Empire was pretty fucked up and the countries it colonized (and the country that is now called the Free State of Oahk) are all kind of fucked up about it. Calado is widely agreed to be the worst, and Yvalta one of the most functional, apparently on the basis of how predictably you can take prosocial actions and have a baby about it. Met does "chain sterilizations", where one possible sentence is having various degrees of relation to you sterilized; nobody else does that one.
Oh no, those places are horrible! Someone competent should try to fix Calado and Met! Sterilization isn't irreversible, but he bets it is on Amenta!
... What are the most functional countries, in the opinion of the internet? (Also, why don't people just leave Calado?)
(Correction: What are the most functional countries in the opinion of the internet, checking in translated-from-Tapap first, and translated-from-whatever-the-most-popular-non-Tapap-language-is second?)
Oh, people can't just leave Calado because nobody is taking immigrants unless they're exchanged for a similar quantity and kind of emigrants. Those are headcount opportunities they could be using to give their citizens babies.
The opinion of the Tapap-speaking Internet is that Tapa's doing great, and that Anitam and Cene and Baravi are all fine too. The opinion of the Voan-speaking Internet is that Voa is doing great and a handful of tiny countries that also guarantee at least one child are distant seconds. The opinion of the Oahkar-speaking Internet is that except for Tuviri, which for all anyone knows might be a paradise, every country has some problems and should stop picking on them.
He's kind of curious why these people's politics is so thoroughly centered around babies. "Having kids" is supposed to be a good experience to have in your life before you move beyond the flesh, not that it's one he ever had, but it sounds like literally every country here's main thing is centered around kids??? He wonders if humans cared that much too, back when they only had one planet.
(Also, what's Tuviri?)
Tuviri is a highly isolationist nation southwest of Voa. They allow observers for things like population control, and there's some trade, but they don't have tourism going in or out and they have a separate internet.
Oh. He appreciates the clarification.
... He thinks everyone needs better immigration policy, and better child policy, and not killing babies, but honestly the discovery that Amenta was a limitless well of terrible things has kind of made him less unhappy about any of the individual terrible things. Maybe this is just what people do when their smart people don't have chips in their heads? Either way, it seems fixable by (a) suggesting that they kill less babies because he can get them INTO SPACE, and (b) getting them into space, so a horde of social workers actually trained for the job can descend on them and sort out all their problems.
Well, that's all in the future. Right now, he's headed to Tapa.
He was already in Tapa, but now here he is in a more convenient part of Tapa. Here's a charger for his pocket everything, here's a lot of questions from green engineers that he can respond to by highlighting books in the huge text dump, would he like to recommend any fiction or other entertaining content for the general public to enjoy and celebrate over?
... Okay, they'll have some problems with some of the non-text-fiction, but here's some of his favorite novels: This one's a military romance set in ancient history about someone fleeing to a higher-tech country to organize the resistance to retake his homeland after an evil empire conquers it and falling in love with a woman who wants to rule his home country, this one is psychological hard science fiction about a space explorer trying to fix his ship before its orbit decays and it crashes into a star while dealing with the psychological problems that made him get into such a dangerous situation in the first place, and this one is a sociological fantasy story about someone randomly given miraculous powers and trying to use them to end poverty and running into lots and lots of difficult complications because ending poverty is hard.
Amentans will gleefully read Space Books. What kinds of problems would they have with the non-text, are they in 3D or out of Amentan hearing range or something?
Out of hearing range, outside the visual spectrum, designed to interface directly with the chip in your head... technology opens up a lot of prospects for new art, but that means the art is locked to the technology. But people still read novels.