"Maybe they would be willing to give us an alternative."

"Maybe."

"If you don't enforce population controls you get mass starvation. Or endless wars."

"How Malthusian."

"We'd love to do better. We're working on it from as many angles as we can. It's just not an option with the tools we have at present."

"What are you going to do if you meet aliens who find even your better morally atrocious?"

" - I don't think we'd be willing to, what, make the gay people divorce? - even for starships. Probably some country would and then let their gay people swap out to some country that wasn't."

"What about the reds? Seeing as castes are uncommon, sample size of ten."

"If anyone has robots who can do the red jobs we'd be thrilled not to have reds."

"Are we assuming they like the reds enough to sanction us over it but not enough to accept red immigrants themselves?"

"Or don't feel able to accept a population that will reproduce as fast as you're inclined without controls and whose presence might affect where they can go depending on how well you fare in interplanetary diplomacy."

"If societies want to sanction us over reds or gays we'll get by fine without universal approval ratings. If starships were conditional on it and there were no prospects of that ever changing - I think most governments would decide to kill the reds and hope it isn't held against their grandchildren."

"Wow."

"If we had planets we could just give them one."

"Would you?"

"I think so. It might depend how expensive it is to terraform them."

...sigh.

"I think people'd find it a bit frustrating to be judged by societies that are beyond scarcity over the tradeoffs we make under conditions of extreme scarcity. Particularly when the judgment accompanies a reluctance to help us get more resources, it feels a bit perverse."

"Are castes a scarcity thing somehow?"

"Almost entirely. If we can afford to fund this many university-preparatory schools and this many vocational training programs and we know the heritability of aptitude for university is over ninety-eight percent, it'd be doing our people a ridiculous disservice to throw away that information. Every proposal I've seen for casteless training and preparatory programs costs the government vastly more than what we've got for worse results. ...and if someone let non-greys enlist in the military their neighbors would all panic and there'd probably be a war."

" - very strong norms that only greys enlist serve to keep the playing field level without everyone devoting all their resources to war."

"...aha."

"If we didn't have castes we'd be putting a lot of kids through school that wasn't going to help them or get them a meaningful job and then dropping them on the world with some background in literature and no idea where to find work they enjoy that pays well."