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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 would appreciate it. It would help me to understand the situation better, since most of what I can do to help I don't know is needed.
I'll get something written up for you within the next couple of hours.
An hour and a half later there is a report listing all the projects, including some with redacted locations and other information working on robotics-adjacent projects.
Fascinating. Nau will do his best with this improved knowledge to make sure that the project goes well, and that they aren't killing too many reds in the process.
So, well by his standards. Which are, so far as he is presently concerned, the ones that matter.
He does, of course, fret about the political problem. The people talking to him seem to have glided right past it. How are they going to get reds to go along with this? How are they going to get everyone else to go along with this? He doesn't know, and he wishes he did.
... He starts keeping an encrypted journal, and broadcasting it home (at, tragically, not FTL speeds) disguised as perfectly ordinary static. If this does go horribly wrong, he wants Imai* to eventually know what he was trying to do, whether or not he succeeded.
Nobody spontaneously brings up with him their twelve-point plan for getting reds to cooperate.
Then his priority is to try and calculate how he can find any reds to talk to. Do they have forums, websites, blogs? Do they talk about aliens, on these forums, websites or blogs?
They have forums, websites, and blogs.
They are mostly password-protected, clean roleplayers, or presented as belonging to clean people till somebody outs them and they go dark.
Password-protected, you say. "My shipboard computer has more processing power than your civilization and isn't very busy," is the sort of thing NAU says. He thinks he will see just what internet security looks like in Amenta.
Internet security looks like: the forum website already knows what email addresses are supposed to be logging in to the site, so the "create account" page errors out and notes his attempt when he tries it.
Heh. Well, then, was the website programmed by someone with proper security mindset? Was it, indeed, intended to defend against hostile actors with vast quantities of processing power and a spare hour with nothing better to do? Nau will check!
It IP blocks him. If he gets a new IP address and tries to find the login information of an existing account, it tells him to email his organizer to have them authorize the new device.
!@#$. Okay, so much for his superior technology.
... Can he try to track down one of the people who is red but formerly passed as clean and whose internet identity showed common sense, reason, and a willingness to engage in positive-sum trade, and who hasn't been murdered? Like, and get a current email address for such a person, or something?
Ones whose blogs are still up: yes!
One who have public facing email addresses that aren't things like "gofuckyourself@firstspire.com"? No!
He's sure he has SOME textual analysis software SOMEWHERE, and if he doesn't, he can train his machine-learning systems on Amentan books until they can reliably recognize text written by the same author in different styles, and then see if the Amentan internet thinks the authors of these still-up blogs have written anything else that they posted to the internet.
That works way better. Lots of those reds have new blogs on different platforms now.
Excellent. In that case, Nau is going to find an unusually reasonable red blogger, and send the following private message:
Hello. I'm Nau. I'm the alien who crash-landed recently, and I'm looking for intelligent, reasonable people to consult with about how to get your species into space without it first carrying out a quiet mass murder. I'm prepared to confirm my identity via computationally-intensive math or highlighting unrevealed text from the publicly-revealed corpus - if you name a subject for the next thing for scientists to be very excited about, I can get you an alien publication on the topic. I located you as a possible candidate to speak to based on the sensible things you said on your old blog about $subject, since I want a consultant outside the Tapai government to help me with what is currently our most pressing issue.
He'll then send out that message until someone responds reasonably quickly, varying $subject as necessary by what they blog about. Doesn't matter if it's a troll response, just as long as they're willing to let him keep talking.
well isn't that something
But he doesn't WANT them deleted overnight! They were saying useful things! Why do his actions turn out this way?
I don't suppose we can skip straight to you giving me an absurd arbitrary task to perform that I couldn't accomplish if I wasn't telling the truth?
Understandable, if unfortunate. How about some alien novel recommendations? I have excellent taste in fiction.
Great! He highlights three novels nobody's seen yet, one of which is about high-stakes international diplomacy, one of which is an epic tournament in a board game unfamiliar to Amentans but with rules explained on-page, one of which is about someone on an alien world trying to figure out what's killing settlers.
The love interest in the second has red hair. The third gets into it because his father's the undertaker. The international diplomacy is about sanctions on a country that attempted to stop people from emigrating.
If he doesn't hear back in the next three hours, he'll send the simple, quiet message:
Do you think you'll want your own planet, long-term?