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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 -
Do you want the relevant page numbers or are you just screwing with me? Because if the latter, I'd appreciate JUST BEING GIVEN AN ARBITRARY IMPOSSIBLE TASK ALREADY. Or blocked.
(Nau sends his message out a couple more times to other people, wishing this wasn't the best person he had.)
next time they have you on camera do the South Mountain Sign gesture for "fish"
He gets another reply:
I didn't write that blog, I think you have the wrong person
... What's the South Mountain Sign gesture for 'fish'? Is it absurdly embarrassing in non-South Mountain Sign?
The South Mountain Sign gesture for "fish" is apparently using three fingers to draw imaginary lines on the side of your neck, like gills. Not something you'd do by accident but not terribly out of place.
Fair enough! Then he can pretend to scratch his neck later.
Acceptable. Hope you like the books.
I actually found someone else. His arbitrary test was to make the South Mountain Sign gesture for "fish" the next time I'm on camera. If you want in then you can message me. I enjoy your blog.
Well, it's not as though he WANTS to be on camera, but he can protest it slightly less in the near-future. Maybe schedule another demo where people can get whatever footage they somehow missed getting of his replicator-factories earlier?
The alien wants as little video of him as possible, because time he is on camera is time he can screw up disastrously more easily, and also because people. But he'll do it, since he (ugh) needs to.
I want robots and no dead reds, and if your planet behaved slightly more like mine this would not be a difficult request. I have a not-horribly-doomed plan but the government of Tapa doesn't have a plan to implement it that they're willing to share with me, so I thought I would talk to the actual people who want to not all die and see if I could bring some of them in on it. Congratulations on on being the first one to return my calls.
("Behaved slightly more like mine" comes from editing out "was sane" and replacing it with something more tactful, in the event that the Tapai government ends up succeeding on spying on one of them.)
Ever wanted to be an invincible immortal cyborg? It comes with every part of your body except your brain being replaced with living metal! Perks include better senses, the ability to hear radio waves (you can turn this off if you want), being bulletproof, the ability to survive reentry temperatures, pain that increases logarithmically instead of linearly, and not getting killed by your own government!
Yeah, that's why we invented artificial wombs and the ability to synthesize arbitrary cells first. My species does still exist.
But we wouldn't be able to get pregnant, or nurse them? Would living metal feel right to a baby?
WHAT IS WITH THIS SPECIES.
Unfortunately, Version 0.1 will not have these features! It just comes with nigh-immortality. I can reshape my body at will, though, so you can upgrade as soon as we invent Amentan versions of those.
What about our children who are children now? What about people who are pregnant now?
Tapa is not close to being able to do this for everyone. People who are pregnant can have their children; children can grow up to the point where it's definitely safe for their age, and I can make sure we have artificial womb technology before we're ready to roll it out for everyone. (It's much simpler technology.)
... Because each child credit for a child-born-from-red-parents-but-technically-not-red-in-a-herediary-pollution-sense-due-to-being-born-via-artificial-womb is one fewer child credit for a red child they need to assign?