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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 -
Wow. Fifty babies.
That's probably more impact than he's had on... anything, by his actions and not just his random coincidences, prior to sending that email.
Tapa has well over a billion people, and some people every year decide they can probably hide a baby or that it would be worth it just to hear one cry or that the money will materialize or that they will get an abortion NEXT month... NEXT next month...
The policy in Tapai protectorates such as Shi Alassei is basically the standard "take baby, give to would-be adoptive couple on waiting list".
He doesn't approve of any of their population control measures! But population control measures are not explicitly banned as the sort of thing no civilized society could ever do. Imai* can imagine situations where it would implement population controls; it has population controls on forking, if not serious ones. But it would never kill babies unless it was at war and it was an unfortunate side effect of an absolutely necessary military move...
Okay, Imai* has probably killed some babies. But at least it doesn't want to kill babies, and at least he got Tapa to stop.
He is left largely alone apart from intermittent questions from the resident greens about his language, his textbook dump, anything he'd like publicized in cute articles about him personally as an individual, if he has any input on how to transliterate his name, etc.
"Naufragus" will do reasonably well as a usename. It means "shipwrecked." Or Nau for short. He does not want to write personal articles about himself; he is not personally interesting.
He's happy to assist with his textbook dump. He's happy to assist with their language. He hopes their science is progressing rapidly. He scans their news for articles of interest to getting home. He starts doing the bits of repairing his spaceship he can do, and urges them to focus on fixing the hyperdrive, which is so far beyond him he has not the faintest notion of where to start. Do they want him to print any tiny things? He can print tiny things if they want him to.
They could use some printed things for their attempts at re-engineering the hyperdrive, yeah!
Understood. He'll print them. In particular if they want to take a crack at looking at what Imai*'s computer chips looks like, that's the thing he has most experience with, but the replicator-factories can do lots of things as long as the Amentans can keep him supplied with the relevant earths.
The Amentans can produce feedstock for the replicators! May the greens watch them work?
Introvert On: NO ABSOLUTELY NOT MY SHIP IS MY PRIVATE SPACE.
*delete response before sending*
Decent Human Being On: Yes, I'll take one of them out of the ship and run it for a while outside so you can watch it work in better light.
Great!
It mostly just looks like a metal box; a large box, but not so massive that Nau (who is a little taller than the average Amentan, and a good deal stronger) can lift without too much difficulty, and pack four of into his ship's protected core. The top has various containers for the feedstock the Amentans provided him; the bottom eventually dings and spits out a tray, on which is their desired printed thing. It isn't mass production, but it doesn't have very many limits on what it produces slowly.
Could they put cameras inside to see what it's doing or would that just wreck them?
... Huh. He has no idea what the answer to that question is. Whenever he'd fixed them, it was 'follow the manual, take out the broken piece, replace it with an identical not-broken piece', he doesn't actually know how they work other than what it says in the manual.
"I think there is a one-in-ten-thousand-chance that would somehow break the replicator-factory, and so I would rather not. If you think it is absolutely necessary I will hazard the experiment, but I expect it would slow us down a good deal if it broke."
They can at least wait till they see if there's documentation on how replicator-factories work and what breaks them in the data dump.
There probably is, somewhere in the data dump. (He has no idea where.)
... He's now back to missing asteroid mining. The people were less nice, but the stakes were so much lower!
(But he keeps that thought to himself.)
They have a LOT of people looking on finding stuff in the data dump and making it more searchable and better translated.
They are going to find a lot of interesting things in it!
For instance, humans... don't seem to want kids that much? Like, there's a lot of fiction with humans going through heroic danger and strife to rescue their children, but nowhere near as much as their is to rescue romantic partners, and only a minority of people recorded in history had more than 2-4 children. Also, especially in the world portrayed in the older fiction, humans seem to be more sexually dimorphic than Amentans, though some of it comes with warnings that it isn't to be taken seriously.
They also do not have a caste system! At all! There are mentions in fiction of people whose parents were plumbers and nobody thinks this was strange!!! And they are all hyposensitive except for a few people who are portrayed as having mental illnesses! Lots of human texts seem to talk about 'social mobility' - like, people whose parents were purple becoming green - as if it is a Very Important Virtue and all societies should be judged based on how much they do it!
They also appear - if the astronomical data is right - to have formerly had even shorter lives than Amentans, before Imai* cracked that. Imai* and those of its confederates who have adopted uploading are now comfortably ahead of Amenta, while other worlds merely have ten to twenty or so Amentan years on them.
Oh, and the League's technology is... kind of horrifying. Amenta has not found any descriptions of how to mass-produce robots yet, but it sure looks like Imai* does not have any manual laborers except hobbyists, and a small but significant minority of its laws appear to be for the purpose of preventing experimenters from accidentally rendering planets uninhabitable.
Wow! Well, they are aliens. But they will take the opportunity to ask Nau as delicately as possible if he can be confident he and his ship are definitely properly clean.
If they define 'properly clean' as meaning 'everything inside it has been heated to above the boiling temperature of water at some point since a biological thing last touched it', everything is properly clean except his brain, which is inside a nigh-impenetrable metal case surrounded by his entire body.
They'll call it good! Trade with a hyposensitive civilization will be complicated but arguably not having a caste system probably means they avoided the Amentan problem of having hereditary pollution. Does Nau know what's up with how humans don't seem to want kids?
... Nau isn't quite sure what they mean. He thinks that most people, if you asked them "do you want, at some point in your life, to have children" would answer "yes, definitely?" "Having kids" rates highly on life-satisfaction surveys? HE doesn't want kids because he doesn't feel he's competent to take care of them he's an extreme outlier in many respects, but he's an extreme outlier in many respects.
Okay, but like... they don't want kids a normal amount. For an Amentan. They weren't actually expecting to be different on this axis, because evolution.
Right, how many kids to Amentans want -
Ohmy.
... You know that's actually a really good point, Amentans do seem to be better designed for evolution's purposes than humans are. He doesn't know what's up with that.
(quick check)
Birth rate plummeted when good birth control showed up. So. Uh. Huh. Why don't humans want kids a normal amount for an Amentan? Evolution sure dropped the ball there.