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You're the first Colony Administrator (and every subsequent one, for the sake of discussion). You've got a hospitable planet. You've got ~2000 healthy, intelligent, and generally hopeful colonists, with an even 50/50 split between males and females. And finally you've got your Colony in a BoxTM that has everything needed for their immediate survival, plus the schematics for more sophisticated equipment as your colony expands. The only bottleneck is your population.
It's a big, scary galaxy out there, so naturally you want to get into a higher weight-class asap, but you're a nice person, so you want to do it ethically. That means no:
- Brainwashing/mind control
- Cults
- Violation of bodily autonomy
Things are pretty spartan right now, so no bottle-babies or IVF, and for the reasons listed above, there will be no more contact with your home planet. The only way to grow is through good ol' fashioned, consensual baby-making. So, what do you do? How would you incentivize reproduction? What cultural practices/beliefs would you promote? Or would you rig your water filtration unit to make tequila, blast "Careless Whispers" from sundown to sunup and hope for the best?
If realism rather than tonal or moral reasons are your concern, let me assure you: Making most of the common drugs is on the lower end of organic chemistry as far as difficulty is concerned. The core hurdle comes from control of precursors and finding the overlap between people who are willing to put in the necessary learning and people willing to break the law and risk a stable career in the regular market.
Remember. You'll also want to synthesize medicinal drugs at scale with redundancies and ASAP so the requisite resources and capacities will be around anyway.
Chemistry/pharmacology courses are usually a hard split between people on the spectrum who never touch grass ever and use the word "degeneracy" unironically and hard-partying weirdos who synthesize legacy drugs for fun.
Or so I'm told. Let's not implicate anyone. 😄
hile there would be no forcing people to have kids, there would be a strong expectation that if you're childfree, you'll either be the cool aunt/uncle, or taking a position that's highly incompatible with raising children.
Yeah. You essentially want to cement the idea that there's no such thing as "not having children". They might just be your biological ones or other people's or you're so far away that you'd never even see any.
Also the drugs in the water thing is a bit exaggerated but the concept of drug-using group rituals honestly could easily make a comeback. You have few people in the middle of absolute nowhere. Might as well combine team building and entertainment and hold a political gathering at whose end you re-enact the dance scene from Matrix II with Space!MDMA for everyone to wind down and later enjoy themselves in their various individual tents.
Yep. It's already gonna be somewhat biased towards fecundity
The Olympic village has zero issue with making people bang. I genuinely do not think it'd be an issue. Scarcity of mobility is the real fertility killer i.e if there's a keen awareness that your children will not attain your same living standard as you or better people don't breed. Poverty and prosperity can both lead to that. Breeding happens on the other edges of said curve hence why both billionaires and the destitute have the most children and those of the middle class the least.
With that out of the way: I'd build upon the things that made said colonists sign up in the first place. Nature abhors a vacuum and as I said people will start proliferating if they feel like they have the ability to carve out a niche for themselves. Don't per se run propaganda posters for breeding but heavily lean into a culture of making the planet your own and let them fill out the blanks on how to best achieve that.
Oh definitely. In Uruguay this happened naturally after a war and sort of turned into a Thing until numbers stabilized.
It's wrong. There's an estimated genetic bottleneck of like a few hundred people sometime in the distant past. It's where we believe the stories of the flood came from. IIRC the limit is somewhere closer to 120 if you prevent lower than third cousin consanguinity.
You can service a water pump while pregnant. You can't beat a sprint record. Circumstances adjust to needs.
No, people researched that. You can (and we have) bred back up from a few hundred people.
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Hmmmm... I'd probably segregate the schooling until around 15 years of age or so, personally. Lets the teachings sink in properly and by the time they're taught together things have nicely arrayed themselves around what you want.
"You break it you buy it".