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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 -
It's especially weird because humans have a narrower natural fertility window! They make up for it - or could - by being fertile year-round, but they don't seem to do that at all.
That is bizarre. What is up with humanity. Maybe they can find a book on evolutionary biology anywhere? That might have answers even if Nau doesn't.
It is like his reaction to the prospect of a small sentient entity being almost totally dependent on him being dread. That is what it is like.
Weeeeeird. Does he like other people's babies? There has been some concern that he might be under-babied what with having to stay with his ship and not even seeing babies on the train or whatever.
Not tremendously, no. He's told this often changes when you have your own, for humans.
... Humans do not get under-babied. At least not most humans. This may be another one of these 'alien' things.
Wow. Kind of the final strike against the people who were holding out support for the "humans are actually our species somehow some way" hypothesis.
Nau has heard stories about how bizarre some of the human subspecies out there can be, but he's not betting on it being true any more, no.
Also on closer inspection of medical texts it looks like Amentans are biologically different in a bunch of ways, just mostly not ones you can see superficially.
Yes, his computer was confident Amentans were aliens just about as soon as he landed. He was slow to catch up with it.
It connects to the chip in his head and then the language runs out of words. It's sort of like having extra limbs, or sort of like having a calculator in your head, but mostly it's like something his machine translator refuses to admit you have concepts for.
Cool. Can he point them at documents on the development of the brain chips? They sound neat and the neurologists in particular don't have that much going on at the moment and feel left out.
Hmm. With some searching, probably?
... Here's some stuff that sounds vaguely like the right sort of thing. Be careful, messing with brains is very dangerous.
They will be super careful. Initial research will probably mostly be on very old people, or people who need a brain computer interface to do basically anything because they're super paralyzed or something.
Good. And once you get in touch with the League, they have lots of bored scientists and entrepreneurs, but he understands you might not want to wait that long.
... If that's going to take a while, though, uh... do you want some automatic factories? Nau doesn't think he can mass-produce you robots yet, but he does think he might be able to adapt some of his mining technology to build you some self-running factories. Not a lot, though, since he needs to use the replicator-factories to make their processing systems.
That sounds awesome! Anything to free up more of the economy to throw more effort at getting into SPAAAAAACE.
Great! Can he ask for some help from some people who know what kind of factories he can do? There's charts for the basic version HERE and HERE and HERE - it's mostly metal controlled by computer systems, he thinks he's got ninety percent of it in his mining drones but there's another ten percent he'll need to implement from descriptions there, they're relying on some alloys you can't make with your tech base but he can produce small amounts to get started and then maybe they can snowball this and then they can have lots more metal.
Sounds good to them! They can send him purple engineers to get that prioritized and logistics'd.
Purple engineers appear! They are a little nervous but mostly excited. Seems like the bottleneck is metallurgical and they should catch up there first thing; the metallurgist introduces herself as Piki Tai.
Hello, Piki. The main issue is that the cynodes I'm producing to manage the factories work by directly manipulating Sarengha steel via electrical charges, then that serves as a sort of improvised 'body' to work as the manipulators of the factory, and you don't have Sarengha steel other than what I brought or what my replicator-factories can print...
So maybe they should make a little bit and have the little bit controlling some articulated arms of conventional materials?
That sounds extremely logical! Nau will see if he has any preexisting sources on how to do this... oh, yes, of course, the first place to check is that his old limbs used to work that way. Speaking of which he would like to send a message requesting electrically-insulated work clothes in his size while he works on this, and then he can see if there's anything on the mechanical-engineering side of modern artificial limbs that he can copy...
Oh sure, Piki can take some measurements while they're talking and send it off to a place that does resistor-outfits, that's where she gets all her clothes because she's too short for off the rack. And she knows a little bit about artificial limbs and can refer him to an industry contact!