"People just hurt so badly, every year, and it's hard to look at your people and say 'sorry, even with planets there'll never be a world where you can have the thing you want'."

"You are a fantastically rich society and could have bought the land and left everybody better off. Did Kantil not suggest it? I neglected to ask."

"Bought it from who? France would have sold us Canada, but I don't think they had more claim to it than we did."

"I'm sure you could have had a chunk of Siberia from the Russians and electrified it so it wasn't too cold to live in. These cities don't take up all that much room, you could have bought lots of smallish enclaves and lived on them as densely as you're used to and worked on that basis to figure out who to buy adjacent bits from if the natives weren't super obvious about it."

"The cities don't take up tons of space but their supply chains do, and I'm not sure that the claim of the Russian Tsar to a chunk of Siberia was any more legitimate than ours either."

"Or land among nomads, displace them but don't actually conquer them and they're nomadic anyway - there's more and less intrusive options besides 'conquer the planet'."

"Yeah, sure, if we could've backed out of the treaties on population controls and lived to tell about it we could've been lots less intrusive. Better seems more debateable but definitely less intrusive."

"You weren't responsible for the quantity of humans before you conquered the Earth. What exactly made you responsible for it?"

"Population controls are a concern everywhere we know about. We are responsible for Earth because Aitim said 'can we have the planet in exchange for implementing them', if he hadn't done that someone else would have and then it'd be them on the hook."

"What's the planet-divvying procedure?"

Hair-touch - "well, you've got to have the resources to handle it, and of the places that have the resources they just argue it, I think, and then people quietly signal level of willingness to start a fight over it and it gets settled before it gets to that point. This one was easy, it's not that desirable a planet objectively speaking and Anitam invented FTL and had the strongest claim to first planet anyway."

"Then why'd you have to agree to administer the natives to get it?"

"You mean as opposed to killing them all? Or as opposed to not imposing population controls?"

"As opposed to not placing yourselves in a position such that you could impose them. Just put a few cities down in emptier places and maybe do some trade. I'm not actually sure this was worse, I'm sure more people have been saved of malaria than have been executed for throwing punches or tomatoes, but I'm not clear how it was off the table."

" - there was a population with an average family size of eight and no spacing and just hitting industrialization which'd let them support more. There was no way - look, the agreements around population control are the strongest agreement we have, as a society, they have to be, the alternative was so much worse. There's just absolutely no circumstances under which we learn of a nearby population growing that fast and go 'well, there's currently space for a city here, guess we'll leave them to it' - it'd be completely insane -"

Sigh.

"If we'd been powerful enough to complicate enforcement?"

"Then they'd have tried to persuade you diplomatically to impose them. But unless we were definitely going to lose a war, we'd go to war over that, the war'd be worse in twenty years when you ran out of space."

"We were not twenty years from running out of space."

"I was thinking of our years, and you might've been if the family size stayed the same and the infant mortality rate dropped, that's quadrupling every generation. A billion people, four billion people, sixteen billion people, and space is starting to look tight."

"We're expecting family sizes to drop."

"Sure, thanks to information no one else has. If you landed on Amentans who were averaging eight and you went 'eh, they've got space', you'd be regretting it after not all that long - and not doing them a favor, either, since they might've preferred to have three and have their kids and grandkids have three instead of eight right up until it's two."

"I think we would have noticed that every spring you start treating babies like - I don't even know what it's like, it's its own thing - and could have worried about that, and you could have noticed that we don't. If you didn't have population controls any religions that might have the clout to forbid birth control wouldn't have to bother."

"...uh, we voluntarily use birth control for lots of reasons. Having sex with people you don't want to co-parent with, not wanting a kid because it's a bad year for it or you're expecting a sibling or cousin or you've got a one-year-old, on Earth most permaspringing people would definitely use birth control because it's crazy to have them that close together. We knew humans don't feel the same way about babies but we thought that was because you all had eight and no spacing and lived in desperate poverty, even Amentans can get burned out if they're trying to support tons and tons of kids who are likely as not to die by age one. I think you are very seriously overestimating how obvious it is by looking at Earth that your default birthrate with no religiosity and perfect birth control would be at replacement."

"Below. Wizards are barely at replacement with outmarriage."