Ok, here is some lore regarding our population situation.
Tell me what to think.
The expedition fleet was one of the largest exploratory endeavours of humanity, with several thousand crew members. But while that is a significant size for a scientific team studying a planet and establishing an initial settlement, it is a whole other story when several thousands is all that is left of humankind.
Whatever destroyed Earth was still out there and a small crew would have no chances of fighting against it. In order to do that, it would be necessary to expand, create infrastructure, exploit the planet, and produce more bright minds to research new technologies for the sake of survival. The need to increase the population as rapidly as humanly possible has been present since the early days of Gaia.
An ambitious goal was set, to have each generation 10 times as large as the previous one. Initially, there was much rejoicing for the so-called Aphrodite project, but it took barely nine months before the colonists discovered that there is more to it than having sex all the time. Children need to be fed, children need to be cared for. Mothers need assistance during pregnancies. And then, they start to walk, and they need to be followed and educated. And during his or her active time, a colonist would have to do so for 10 children, conception to adulthood! It soon became clear that this plan, now rechristened Hera initiative, would be one of the biggest efforts ever undertaken by humans and would tie a good percentage of the manpower of the colony.
A full quarter of the population works constantly for the task of raising children into the great minds of the new generations, and even that is only possible thanks to the widespread help of robotics, automation and quite a bit of applied technology. After the initial days, live pregnancy became fairly rare, with artificial wombs both publicly and privately owned being the rule: after all, a baby is too precious a thing to risk miscarriages and the mother needs to return to the very scarce work force as quickly as possible. While gestating, the embryos are taken care of by a host of specialized doctors, whose role is also to remove any serious genetic illness that could jeopardize the growth of the future children and ensure a proper growth and timely “pregnancy”. Then, after entering our world they are mostly taken care of by the community: 20 children per couple (or 10 children per person, in case of single parents) is well beyond what the so-called nuclear family, especially in those busy times. While it would be tempting to just feed them automatically and let them grow with minimal involvement, human contact and interaction is emphasized as much as possible with the resources available, androids only used as last resort. It is of paramount importance to get out of the process well adjusted, brilliant, capable and driven citizens, not merely dumb bodies. While parents try to be involved in the lives of their children as much as possible in their free time, they are largely children of Gaia (or at least their local subset).
Schools are the next step, and the most important one. It is almost trivial to make great quantities of babies and while they are young enough to wander off they are easy enough to feed and keep safe. After that, you let them play in non-dangerous areas with cameras and some oversight. But education? Education is paramount. Each of those children has to be a future scientist, engineer, soldier, ruler. Excellence is the only option if we want our society to grow. At the lowest levels we have the incredible ratio of one omni disciplinary teacher every 50 students, making sure that they learn all the basics of science, math, history, geography, ancient media and Gaian society. Then, the ratio of teachers to students decreases and teachers become more focused in specific sectors in universities, where a single professor can teach a subject to several hundred young adults. At all stages, emphasis is set on the ability to work independently and with discipline, taking advantage of the available computer networks and the freely available and highly encouraged tests to self-educate, with the teacher serving mostly an advisory role and as an authority figure. Internships and social work are highly valued by society, being a way to relieve the pressure on the scarce adult population.
Finally, at the end of their education with a degree in hand and the energy of youth, a new generation can start working for the good of Gaia, lending their minds and bodies and preparing immediately to help growing a further generation, 10 times their number.
Childbearing in the capital and in the sparse settlements in the rest of the world has some striking differences. In the capital, a megalopolis of almost 200k inhabitants, the crowded environment means that centralized government facilities are most used: great hospitals for bearing children, vast schools, gardens, recreational and educational facilities of all kinds: the best for the future elite (and roughly a fifth of the population of the planet). This system is quite efficient in terms of manpower, but the involvement of adults with children ends up being more impersonal. All in all, it is not terribly different from what you could find on Earth, except in scale.
In the outlying areas however, the role of raising children falls to the community in a self-organized manner, typical of the small villages and communities of old. Midwives and nurses make a comeback, although without a distinction of gender. In the large countryside it is common to let children gather in some of the larger estates to play and explore together, and classes are held in a less regulated manner, with ad-hoc and personalized teaching more common. Less efficient, but the higher personal involvement has been noted to be beneficial in some ways, forming stronger bonds.
While the target has never been truly achieved due to scarcity of infrastructure or in more recent time a revival of personal parenting, the programme is widely considered a success. Starting from just roughly 5,000 citizens, we became 30,000, then 250,000, then in the middle of the third generation we stand at 900,000, on track to return to the numbers of Earth that was in just 3 or 4 more generations.
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Topic: The Gaian Regime Empire Thread | Terrans | GalactiRace (Read 47158 times)