"Depends the tack you took - I think most people would be happy with being able to choose whether to spring any given year, for example, or not to have bad springs. Just selecting for the lower end of natural local variance in how many kids people want would probably go over okay - people wouldn't want kids who won't themselves want kids, but I think they'd be happy to have kids who will themselves want an average of three kids instead of five..."

"Fair enough."

Hair-tug. "If any of that's even possible."

"Should I be interpreting that hair gesture? I may have been around Elves too long and they would never."

"Do Elves think it's gay or something? Means, like, 'low confidence because I'm not the caste for a technical conversation on this subject'."

"Elves have erogenous hair. I gave them the Library of Hell and they censored - well, most things, but especially shampoo commercials."

- snort. "Do they not have shampoo commercials?"

"I don't actually know how they make shampoo purchases."

"A sexually conservative censorious monarchy which objects to prison and adoption. I am having a hard time imagining our counterparts."

"I'm not sure if they'd object to adoption if the original parents were unavoidably unavailable."

"If you don't enforce your population laws someone else'll do it for you. With bullets."

"Of course they will."

"That was the nominal justification of the Oahk Empire's, and they were evil but they weren't wrong on that point."

"Suppose."

"Binding agreements on population control cut down on war a lot. No - watching your neighbors grow faster than you and figuring you've got to conquer them now because in five years they'll be stronger and in ten they'll be out of space..."

Nod. "Humans basically don't find growing neighbors threatening. If they can't support themselves they'll starve and if they can they can probably do it on international trade without expanding, we never really pushed the limits on density as much as we could have if we really wanted to. There were always some dense cities but there was also lots of middle-of-nowhere."

"We have places that could go denser. I think Anitam could support a billion people, maybe two with some of these advances in agriculture. But if we set our growth rates to get there in ten years - no one expects that then we'd set credits to maintenance rates, they expect that then we'd find or manufacture provocation and go trim someone else down. Even politicians who think there's something objectionable about conquest tend to find letting their own citizens starve more objectionable, so you've got to head it off long before that."

Nod.

"I'm not sure to what extent we're worse and to what extent we have a harder problem."

"It definitely seems at least partly like 'harder problem'. You wind up with some population-level issues in humans if they don't have access to sex partners - skewed gender ratio or whatever - but if they have birth control and don't have an obvious intrafamily way to handle children they will tend to just not."

"I also wonder if you'd get faster social progress off the shorter lifespans."

"Plausible on the face of it but social progress accelerated and lifespans got longer at the same time."

"I suppose some sociologists can look if there's a correlation among the many many local alien species. All of which are weirdly similar, actually..."

"I'm noticing the humanoids theme, yeah. Maiar and Valar don't have to be humanoid but they do sometimes to blend in better."

"Low-budget aliens on television are just Amentans with makeup and black hair dye and then that turns out to be what actual aliens look like."