Star Trek Fan Series: Comments on New CBS/Paramount Restrictions

In the short time since I've mutated from someone who knew nothing about Star Trek fan series into someone who knows an unreasonable amount, the official reaction to these productions by the copyright holders has gone into major flux. Until 2015, fans were left pretty well free to create what they liked, and my list in the link above shows they did so vigorously, often in lame and awkward ways, sometimes in wonderful, exciting ways. Then the Axanar lawsuit sprang up, and 2016 saw a grinding halt to many fan productions. The May dropping of that suit seemed to signal a return to the previous status quo, or something close to it. Even though they got Abrams to announce that, it did otherwise feel like a conciliatory gesture, and acceptance of symbiosis, rather than parasitism.

[Edit: It seems I'm a little behind, and the lawsuit has not actually been dropped at all, despite the public claim by Abrams.]

Now an official set of guidelines has been jointly released by CBS and Paramount, who control the Star Trek intellectual property, and it seems they've rather missed the fans' point, or were bluffing us all along. Their new restrictions seem to expect little more than volunteer brand advertising, not deep story-telling that creates entirely new material. In particular, their requirements that fan productions not exceed 15 minutes, and not form ongoing series, using only officially licensed merchandise, would seem to spell out almost exactly: "Make a standard short Youtube clip to sell our toys."

Maybe that's just my interpretation, but I think what they're undoubtedly not saying, in any sense, is, "Please continue to tell stories of your own that expand on all the many possibilities of this setting".

Applying these guidelines retroactively to the list I've been drawing up in my older blog post, and cutting out all productions that violate them, would leave hardly any behind. Of the 42 series and movies on my list (at the time that I write this), I believe only the following don't break the new guidelines and would be allowed:

• Redshirt Blues
• Steam Trek: The Moving Picture

And that's it. Two little parodies made decades ago - and I'm not even certain Redshirt Blues passes the 'officially licensed merchandise' rule perfectly. A couple others might sneak through if they take the words 'Star' and/or 'Trek' out of their titles, but these are still only tiny little shorts. The remaining 90% of productions are the big, narrative-driven ones, the ones with actual stories. And sure, I've already claimed that many of those stories are shit, but that's the nature of art; it can't all be good. But absolutely none of it can be good, if it's banned outright.

I have strong thoughts about the jurisprudence behind intellectual property laws, and that inevitably leads into a much wider socio-economics lecture. But let me keep this post short and focused. The bottom line is that these new guideline are a de facto ban on exactly the kinds of productions that fans have been making. CBS/Paramount may have found it awkward from a publicity point of view to shut down Axanar so late in its gestation, but these new guidelines effectively shut down everything of this nature that might be made in future. It's really the same demand from them, but with a grandparent clause added to keep the Axanar hubbub from spoiling their 2016 movie and 2017 series releases.

And that's the major point of this post: To point out that CBS and Paramount really didn't back off at all. They just stepped more quietly to the same point. (I knew we couldn't trust any apparent good news delivered by Abrams.)

[EDIT: This proposal seems like a reasonable, constructive response, if it can grow large enough.]

[EDIT: A week later, there's some useful follow up to consider.]

WFRP2E Speed Combat (House Rules WIP)

I really like the 2nd edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. For its intended function and within its intended setting, it's one of the friendliest, smoothest-running systems I've seen. Its links to WFB remain obvious and sufficiently useful for inter-game borrowing, but it also stands alone as a proper roleplaying system of its own. It's not perfect, but it's flexible enough that even a mediocre GM can improvise through most complications and uncertainties.

The biggest trouble I've had with it has been excessive combat. I realise we're talking about a setting designed to maintain perpetual war between every group that can pick up a stick and call it a war banner, but that's to serve the miniatures game. The roleplaying game just uses that huge conflict as background flavour, something the player characters seldom enter directly themselves. Most of the official early '80s and '90s WFRP adventures (especially the excellent Enemy Within campaign that we're currently playing through again) were explicitly written in a style based more on Call of Cthulhu than Dungeons & Dragons. And their character levelling system (the 'careers') fits with this too; it's very unlikely any PC will ever reach the point that they can stand toe-to-toe with a major demon, dragon, or similarly powerful monster.

Yet WFRP2 remains burdened with a more D&D-like set of combat rules, inherited and adapted from the Warhammer minis combat rules. And combat in WFB (any edition) can be tedious as fuck when you've got a huge block of basic troops flailing stupidly at another huge block of basic troops, each side gradually wearing the other down with millions of dice rolls over several rounds. WFRP seldom has such great numbers, but its combat rules allow for more detail and complexity, so a 5-vs.-5 skirmish can last for even more rounds, and see just as many dice rolled, dragging the game on for hours, all to reveal that... a group of scholars and merchants and peasants are not very good at hitting stuff!

From a story-telling perspective, that's lame: A huge time investment to do very little and not advance an investigation plot at all. And that's annoying enough when the plot-as-written calls for a big fight scene against a group of, say, Chaos cultists. Then everyone's neatly boxed in to a fairly featureless warehouse for 2 hours, all to reach the final point of saying, "One side or the other won, and the following people got injured doing it." Unless you specifically want a combat game over a more plot-driven game, that's pretty inefficient and even boring.

And it's worse again when the combat wasn't even planned. It makes sense that the thief character would try a bit of burglary while in town. It makes sense that she'll fail from time to time. And it makes sense that sometimes that failure will be so terrible, no matter how lenient the GM wants to be, that it only makes sense that the town guard will be fully alerted, drawing a huge fight to the players. Sometimes there are believable ways around this, but the towns of the Empire are usually small and compact and densely populated; raising the alarm is easy to do (in a setting where invasion is frequent), and sneaking around is not. So now we're running an impromtu cops & robbers scene, where the only interesting outcomes are death, capture or escape. Three outcomes. Shouldn't be hard, should be a minor blip in the story-telling process. And instead, the rules as written turn it into yet another half hour or more burned away rolling dice.

So this is the long, waffling background to my new house rules. The combat in WFRP2 definitely isn't the most painfully slow I've experienced by a long margin (Pathfinder has, at times, been far worse, and the various Star Trek RPGs always seem to get shitty combat rules, as I've noted before), and sometimes it's even fun and interesting to play a decent WFRP fight scene. If you want to run a weapon-centric game, then it's actually quite a good option. But if you want to rush through most combat, then I propose the following (and bear in mind, this in the first version of this, pre-playtest). The main idea is to reduce combat to a single skill check, over a single round, same as any other skill check.

When a fight scene occurs, at the GM's option, each character in the fight rolls one attack roll (WS or BS, as appropriate).

If a character rolls a failure, note the number of degrees of failure. Otherwise, that character scores no significant hits.

If a character rolls a success, note the number of degrees of success. For each degree of success, that character has scored one hit against an opponent. Assign hits to specific targets. Assume all characters are free to move around as normal; character position only matters if the GM rules that someone definitely can't be hit (out of range, no matter how the attacker moves around).

(If you're using hit locations, the first hit is on the usual location, with the attack roll's dice swapped around. Subsequent hits land in locations equal to the original location value, plus or minus (attacker's choice) 10 x the number of the hit beyond the first. The attacker may never choose hit locations greater than 100 or less than 01. For example, you score 3 hits with a roll of 23, so hit 1 (n=0) lands on location 32 (23 reversed). Hit 2 (n=1) could be either location 22 or 42 (32 +- 10n). Hit 3 (n=2) could be either on 12 or 52 (32 +- 10n).)

For each hit, roll the attacker's damage, per the standard weapon damage rules, and subtract from that per the standard armour and toughness bonus rules. Defending characters with parry and dodge may use these as normal too, once each per attacker. (I've assumed that once per attacker is a reasonable substitute for once per round). The guiding principle is advancing the plot, adding more chances for the player characters to do interesting things, not roll dice.

If any target is killed and there are still hits assigned to it, re-assign these to other targets.

If either side is completely killed, they lose by default.

Once all individual hits have been resolved, for each side add up all its characters' degrees of success, and subtract from that all their degrees of failure. The side with the higher total degrees "wins" the fight scene, however the GM chooses to intrepret that.

The default assumption should be that the losing side flees. This is what most people would do in real life.

It's up to the GM to decide what sort of fleeing would be appropriate and possible, though if the player characters are the ones fleeing, then they should have some say in where they hope to escape to. Consider movement speed, encumbrance, stealth, terrain, dumb luck, and any other relevant factors.

If there is a compelling reason that the losing side might want to hold on to the bitter end (special training, Orc culture, defending their homes, etc.), then the closest thing the group has to a leader character may make a Command roll to try to keep everyone in place. With a successful Command check, that side still loses, but not by fleeing (see capture/kill, below). If the winning side includes the Terrifying talent, then the losing side automatically loses all Command rolls to resist fleeing.

(It's weird that WFB has this mechanism more or less built in, as Leadership checks, and yet WFRP's rules just assume that everyone's default choice is to fight to the death.)

If a losing group is incapable of fleeing (trapped, rooted to the ground, zombie mindlessness, geas, etc.), then they still lose, but not by fleeing (see capture/kill, below).

If a group loses, but doesn't flee (for whatever reason), then the winning group has to decide whether to capture or kill the losing group. Capture keeps more story threads open (especially if the players are the losing side!), but certain characters may be immune to capture (ghosts and such, which must instead be busted; characters with suicide pills, etc.). For other characters, capture may mean pretty much the same as kill, unless the captors take special precautions (I'm thinking fish out of water?). Resolve this decision on a case by case basis, i.e. roleplay it out. Consider each side's motives, morals, resources, and context.

(I think far too few roleplaying combat systems have substantial capture rules, even though that's a very common result in real skirmishes. It basically means the Altdorf city watch, by the letter of the roleplaying rules, will almost always kill suspects, and almost never actually arrest anyone.)

The one thing I know I haven't accounted for yet is magic. Maybe some sort of channeling test, similar to an attack roll, to see by degrees of success how many castings may be attempted?

This is still a lot of detail, a lot more bookkeeping than most other skill rolls in the system, but I think cutting out the multiple rounds and piles of pointless rolls will speed things up a lot, without altering the end result to the detriment of a good game. You'll also notice that I intentionally haven't removed anything at all from the original character and gear stats, so that when the GM does want to run a more detailed combat (maybe a boss fight against the supreme villain NPC, or a player-vs.-player duel to decide the fate of the party), then it's easy enough to revert to the official combat rules. Nothing is lost, and the GM gains the ability to fast forward through the more tedious slogfests.

I'll revise this once we've given it a play test. In the mean time, feel free to add suggestions for getting this to run even smoother and easier.

How EC Henry Missed the Point

Random youtuber EC Henry wants you to know that JJ Abrams and his writers totally, seriously got Star Trek, you guys. And, lucky you, I've got a free morning to spell out exactly why he's talking crap. His video "Did JJ's Writers Know ANYthing about Star Trek!?", is built around the central straw argument that visual and dialogue references clipped from TOS are what trekkies hated about the Abrams movies and yet are what make the movies so close to TOS.

First, I've never heard anyone complain that 2009 and Into Darkness were bad because they contained callbacks, references and homages. These were expected, and mostly they were done adequately. However, they're nowhere near as subtle as EC Henry seems to think they were, and he's pretty patronising when his video suggests that I must have just missed all those "clever", "hidden" references. I'm a serious trekkie, I hold the pretend rank of captain and own the uniform(s) to match; of course I fucking spotted the "Yesteryear" links immediately. I just didn't give too much of a shit, because these stolen images (including the primary colours uniforms) are not what make a good story. What makes a good story is putting the images and dialogue together in an interesting, meaningful way. "Blowin' shit up" was not especially interesting or meaningful, especially by Star Trek's past standards.

What many fans (including me) have instead complained about is how obvious and clunky many of the references to TOS were, especially in Into Darkness. We got some pretty crappy storytelling from the crude stitching together of as many well-known and unmistakable (but generally unrelated) references from TOS and the TOS movies as the Abrams writers could manage. It's also the exact opposite of the subtle and clever referencing that EC Henry claims is so remarkable. I'm not impressed by either style of referencing, though the crudely obvious stuff was really annoying.

At the same time, I've never heard anyone suggest that the Abrams writers knew nothing at all about Trek, so the title of EC Henry's video is also made of straw. Sure, JJ Abrams himself is brick-ignorant and even antagonistic towards Trek by his own admission. But obviously his other writers knew just enough to show us that they knew exactly enough to fuck it up and no more than that; THAT's the real complaint.

via W. Wheaton

Second, as I've argued in excessive detail already, the thing that made Star Trek what it was, the truly distinctive aspect of the original series and the main link between it and the later series, was not the look of it, nor anything else that superficial, but Roddenberry's sense of human optimism. EC Henry is eager to dismiss this "philosophical stuff" as a post-TNG contaminant, but it was plainly there all along, and Roddenberry and the TOS writers are on record explaining, repeatedly, that they always wanted the show to be about making the world better, in a humanist, social justice sort of way. The silly action scenes were usually crammed in there at the studio's insistence, on the assumption that audiences are stupid. EC Henry apparently doesn't know the historical background of the series well enough to get this crucial detail right. He is, of course, entitled to his opinion about what he personally enjoys and doesn't enjoy, but he steps into Bullshitland when he tries to second-guess the original creators' intentions.

Third, a lesser complaint, EC Henry implies that trekkies hated 2009 because it was a reboot, and then tries to use TMP and TNG to say that we've already accepted these reboots in the past, so we're stupid for not accepting it again now. I don't think this is true. I was genuinely eager for the 2009 movie when it came out, and what left me disappointed was not that there were New Things, but that they'd done such a shitty job with those New Things. TNG changed things from TOS, true, but nearly all trekkies accept these changes as good, worthwhile and for the better, no matter how much they loved TOS before it. But 2009, as previously noted, just fucked things around, adding little new of any value, while also failing (contrary to EC Henry's assertions) to bring back lost wonders from TOS. It wasn't bad because it was a reboot, it was just a bad reboot.

I write all of this, not just because I have some time to kill and it amuses me, but also because I remain hopeful that the upcoming 2017 series will finally return us to my idea of "real" Star Trek, in the sense of being good science fiction (and not just "a thing that happens to be in space") with a strong sense of optimism and progressive ethics. I also hope that all of the many fan productions out there will choose to head more and more in that same direction, and show just how many great stories can come from a wide variety of creative minds all playing around with the same shared vision, but with fresh characters and contexts. I would find that far more satisfying than EC Henry's unimaginative notion that we just have to keep repeating the past, over and over, cutting and pasting from what has already been done, without really understanding what it's all for.

Titan V and the flight of the Phoenix

The Phoenix, Zephram Cochrane's first warp vessel, was a pretty great design. It looks like a very realistic modern rocket, then transforms into an unmistakeably Trekkish-looking spacecraft, which is clever, since those are often two very different looks. And the name really fits beautifully with the swords-to-plowshares metaphor of its construction.

(Twenty year old spoiler warning: Clip from Star Trek: First Contact)

While reading about it, what caught my eye was that the First Contact designers built their Phoenix around the Titan II missile. This is interesting in a few ways. The Titan II launched the Gemini missions from 1964 to 1966, a century before the Phoenix (which every young Trekkie now knows went up on 5 April 2063). The Titan II was in use for 41 years, and the whole Titan family of rockets were launched for 46 years over all, with the last Titan IVB going up in 2005. When First Contact was released in 1996, Titan II had been going for decades and Titan IV was still quite new, so it wasn't crazy to assume that later versions of the Titan rocket might still be flying many decades later, especially if the fictional Titan V (as the movie-makers dubbed their version) had similar longevity to the Titan II

That said, is over a century of persistence likely for a rocket family? We have no idea. There hasn't been a full century of spaceflight yet. We can say that some families have endured well so far, notably the R-7s and the Atlases. But we can also say that some rocket families are really only families on paper, with early models and late models having very little in common. Sometimes, I suspect, the family name is only transferred from one design to another, totally different, design, as a sort of marketing gimmick, a brand recognition thing. So it's certainly feasible that a future ICBM with roughly the same specifications or role as the Titan II might be given the same name. Even so, I would guess that the Titan V that Cochrane's team launches must have been a museum piece to them, a very old left-over missile. If the 40 year lifespan of the Titan II is a guide to what's feasible, then the Phoenix's first stage may well have been built in the 2020s or 2030s.

What we do know is that the Titan V must have had the same 3 meter diameter as all other Titan first stages, partly because the real Titan II museum piece that represented it is clearly seen on screen with that diameter (you could do the geometry on some screen captures, but we don't have to, because that's a real, retired missile body they filmed with, we already know for certain how big it is), and partly because we're told in the movie that the cockpit section is about 4 meters long, which scales well with the 3 meter diameter.

The Titan V (or 5?), compared with real Titan rockets.
Mixed image credit to Ex Astris Scientia and Historic Spacecraft

The Titan V in the image above fits in well enough, apart from bucking the general trend of moar boosters(!) and increasing height. It also has a distinctly larger first-stage engine bell, replacing the pair of smaller engines of the Titan I & II, and the single small engine on the III & IV. The V's engine bell looks almost as big as those on the SRBs that most IIIs and IVs had strapped to their sides. This was a result of the movie people needing to build one as a physical piece of their set, when people are seen walking around the bottom of the launch silo; apparently the real engines had been removed and no realistic fakes had been installed by the museum. We later see that the Phoenix's second stage engine is roughly the same size, though not quite the same shape. [Edit: If the second stage is intended to operate solely in a vacuum, we can surmise that its similar size actually produces different performance, as explained here.]

(I also listened carefully, and the Titan V sound effects do not include the Titan II's distinctive ignition bwoop.)

Most of the interior of the cockpit section seems to be hollow and unused. It's very spacious in there; compare with the much more cramped Gemini crew module. With the pilot sitting in the front and the engineers in the rear, it's clear that most of the cockpit section's length is dedicated to crew space, and it probably doesn't have a big equipment bay right behind them.

Phoenix cockpit section. Mostly empty space. Approx. 4 meters long. Three crew.

Gemini crew module (greeny-blue in this image) and equipment module (white). Combined length of 5.6 meters. Two crew, cramped. Only the crew module returns to land on Earth, while the equipment module is abandoned.

What's interesting about the Phoenix's one known flight is how we can see it's reached quite an altitude, and Earth keeps quickly shrinking further away, and only then is the first stage jettisoned. We never even see the second stage firing; the warp nacelles immediately extend and it goes to warp without any further chemical boosting. This is an altitude comparable to the highest Gemini flight, which needed two Titan stages and an Agena booster rocket (joined in orbit) to get that far up. How does Phoenix manage it with only one stage, even with a much more advanced 21st century model?

Top: Phoenix, first stage still firing, after travelling/boosting for no more than 55 seconds.
Bottom: Gemini XI, all ascent boosters spent, after travelling for over 40 hours, including total apogee-boosting time of around 7 minutes.

A rough eyeball suggests fairly similar curvature to the Earth, so probably fairly similar altitudes, roughly.

It would be easy to dismiss this as typical Hollywood bad science, but I think there's a better solution. The answer lies in the Phoenix's trajectory, pretty close to straight up. You can also see that it's still over North America, so there's not been much horizontal motion. So, I would guess this was a suborbital launch, pretty close to vertical. The advantage of this is that if the warp drive test fails, you're probably going to fall right back to Earth, without the need for a retro burn. I use this trick for simple test flights in Kerbal Space Program all the time, letting gravity do the hard work of getting you home. And if the warp drive does work, then you can just warp out of Earth orbit, and then presumably either warp back again or fire the still untouched second stage rocket to push back towards Earth's gravity well. (Note that there is no clear, canonical relationship between warp speed and realistic sub-warp momentum, so that's harder to discuss.) If the Titan V can reasonably be assumed to have a more powerful, more efficient engine than the Titan II, then this sort of high-apogee suborbital boost may be wasteful, but it's inherently safer for a quick systems test than a full orbital flight. Assuming the landing systems all function...

I have two thoughts about landing the Phoenix. On the one hand, it's assumed (I think even by original designer John Eaves) that the cockpit section is jettisoned as a traditional, parachute-equipped crew module. Only the crew would come home, and the warp drive, the first of its kind, would be abandoned and burned up on re-entry. It would be sad and wasteful, but much easier. This method has plenty of real precedent.

On the other hand, that second rocket motor is pretty damn big for a mere retro booster. It could instead be a landing engine, for a vertical powered landing of the sort that the New Shepard and Falcon 9 rockets have recently demonstrated. The concept was already known in 1996, with the DC-X testing various necessary systems at lower altitudes throughout the '90s. I have no evidence that anyone connected with First Contact was thinking about this at all, but we can at least consider the possibility that Phoenix could potentially make powered vertical landings.

A compromise possibility is that the warp section and crew section each land separately under their own parachutes, perhaps also jettisoning the heavy second stage rocket motor to make things a little easier.

Image credit: LCARS24, I think, if not J. Anderson.

Since we have no idea how big Phoenix's warp core is, we don't know how much internal space it fills. But if we trust the fan diagram above, then the fuel tanks on the second stage rocket might be relatively tiny. You wouldn't get much delta-v out of that, pushing so much heavy warp drive section plus the cockpit section. But it might just be enough for a suicide burn on a vertical landing, or for a last-ditch emergency de-orbit burn. Does someone want to do the maths?

Remember that when the warp drive works, presumably exactly according to plan, it ends up out beyond Lunar orbit. If there isn't a warp trip back in the other direction, then the Phoenix would have had to take a slow sub-light drift back, something similar to the 3-day return trips that the Apollo Moon missions experienced. I'm not sure where they keep the life support (and snacks) for that scenario. But since Cochrane is back on Earth by nightfall the same day (the movie strongly implies), I think we have to assume that not only did it warp back closer to Earth, but it also landed (by whichever means) with great precision very close to Bozeman, so that Cochrane could get pissed with his (surviving) engineers just in time for the Vulcans.

My last major thought about the flight of the Phoenix is how weird it is that it didn't fry all the spectators on the ground and set fire to at least some of their shacks. I don't know what the minimum safe distance from a Titan launch is, but I've got a hunch it's quite a lot more than the maybe 10 meters between the silo opening and the bar.

He's dead, Jim.

And I also suspect that NASA rules would usually prevent people from standing this close to even quite a small rocket.

Maybe I worry too much, but I've got a suspicion that Newton's laws and a powerful rocket exhaust would at least knock these people over and deafen them, if not actually roast them. Little wonder the camera pans away from them so quickly.

Baby Algebra

They say that as soon as you put an equation into any discussion, you automatically lose half your audience. In my experience teaching maths, it can be up to a 100% loss. But I think my blog audience is better than that; most of my blog audience is automated bots who are made of maths. So, when I say I'd like to challenge the common refrain that "poor people shouldn't have so many babies they can't afford," I'm sure you'll all accept that this is a topic where the numbers are crucial.

Also, I've read that people like maths-themed pictures of kittens.

Let's start with a simple model: We have two sets of babies, R rich babies and P poor babies. Rich babies each consume S resources, while poor babies each consume Q resources. There are T total resources in the world. Obviously, T must be greater or equal to (P.Q) + (R.S), and so the upper limits of P, Q, R and S are all restricted by each other. Because Q is defined as a small number, P can be larger. S is defined as a large number, so R must be smaller. But P and R also limit each other, as do Q and S. Because, no matter what, you can't ever have more stuff than T.

So there's competition, even when we make things more realistic and consider all the ways in which PQRST can be more subtle and complicated. That basic model can be manipulated and expanded by thousands of extra variables, but the basic point it illustrates remains true: You can't have more stuff than exists, so more people using more stuff means more pressure on the supply of stuff. And when (P.Q) + (R.S) ends up greater than T, the only possible result is starvation and death.

My whole life, I've heard from (mostly well-meaning) people that poor people disadvantage themselves by having more children than they can afford to support, perpetuating a cycle of poverty, because those under-resourced children are ill-equipped to compete with the health, education and general supporting mechanisms the rich kids have.

This is, thinking it over, a very sad version of victim-blaming. If S = 10.Q, then one rich baby is effectively depriving 9 poor babies of their resources. If S = 1000.Q, then our rich baby has stolen from 999 poor babies! If parents with only Q resources have 2.P babies, they have deprived half their babies (or more realistically, partially deprived all their babies), but that's still a 1 to 9 ratio of over-consumption compared with the S = 10.Q rich babies. Put that way, it's entirely possible that rich parents are the ones we should be condemning for having so many over-indulged babies that we collectively can't afford. The cycle of poverty can be perpetuated by people who aren't poor and may never be poor.

Filling in real-world numbers is a little trickier, because we need to define terms and shit, and you could argue over exactly how to make things fit best. But as a quick, simple demonstration, I'm just going to yank similar-sized national populations with very different GDP per capita (from here, noting that it's 2008 data) and make the crude assumptions that GDP per capita is uniform within each state, and represents solely and entirely the resources available to all their current babies. There are definitely more appropriate and specific figures, instead of those, but I'm only trying to show that a rough approximation is possible that can be assembled by non-specialists with limited familiarity and limited research, which still shows the same basic pattern of results.

I pick Tanzania (P = 35 million humans, Q = $500) and South Africa (R = 46 million humans, S = $29 000), and the GDP per capita alone immediately shows that Q and S can be vastly different in reality. For those without calculators at home, this S = 58.Q, indicating that one South African kid is taking up resources that 57 additional Tanzanian kids would be using, on average. If we take the UN's dollar-a-day minimum survivable income guideline, we can see that Q just barely beats this bedrock minimum of $365. Since P is sort of close to Q, we can further say that even if the Tanzanian population doubled overnight, that population pressure would still be less harmful to Tanzanian babies than the resource competition pressure from South Africa. In this simple case, Tanzania is taking (P.Q = 17,5 billion) units from T, while South Africa takes up (R.S = 1 334,0 billion) units, 76 times more. If T were exactly 1 trillion units, the shared shortfall would hurt South Africa, but it would wipe out Tanzania utterly. Defining the actual value of T, deciding what we should and shouldn't include in it, is another frustration I will gloss over for today; just accept that it's not a very flexible figure at the best of times.

(Of course, reality is even more granular and messy, with stark inequality within both those countries. We could draw an even more dramatic comparison, two decades after apartheid was officially voted out, between the top average white male income and the bottom average black female income in South Africa alone. And then there's the whole rest of Earth to look at. We could discuss the finer details for decades and still not cover it all. Hence my focus on the big picture.)

Obviously I'm looking at this through somewhat Marxy-tinted glasses, but even if you want to take a strictly capitalist-meritocratic view, that different work merits different pay, then please remember that those R babies have done sweet fuck all to earn their wealth, and the P babies haven't yet had a chance to test their merit at all either. I don't believe there is any coherent argument for intentionally keeping the value of S higher than Q, other than naked (and deeply instinctive) self-interest. And that's not a good thing.

There are, of course, still good reasons for cutting over all population growth among everyone, rich and poor. The smaller the sum of P and R, the bigger the sum of Q and S can be, plus we benefit from enormous and fantastic ecological and technical benefits if we totally arrest the growth of P+R. And individuals should certainly do the basic personal maths on their own household economics, as one part of the decision to make any new human. But that personal capacity can't be the only thing we consider. A wider societal perspective is also important - more important, I argue!

So what do we do with this model?

Any sane, self-interested potential parent would want their kid(s) in the R population, and they'd want S to be as high as possible. And most people will openly agree to that, I'm sure. What fewer people will be open about, however, is whether they accept that P and Q will have to shrink to accommodate their private desires. In my experience, mostly talking to middle and upper income people, their public discussion of this comes down to ideology, but regardless of that, very few seem to be willing to admit that R fucking things up for P is a problem that they personally will change their behaviour to fix.

But I think the maths is clear. If we're not assholes, we want Q = S, so that all kids have as close to an equal and fair start in life. And until Q does really equal S, then every growth in R just makes the situation worse, at a worse rate than any growth in P.

I have a lot of wealthy friends and acquaintances* in the the age bracket where humans usually settle down and breed, and these people are basically good people. These people are mostly well educated; some are extremely well educated and unusually intelligent. (Most are atheist, incidentally, so religion is only a distant factor in this discussion.) Almost invariably, they've almost all been very eager to agree with me that overpopulation is a problem and that fewer people should breed and should be having fewer babies when they do (with the exception of one professional philosopher, who started from an argument from ignorance to claim that he didn't know - and wasn't willing to make any effort to learn - any reason for him not to breed, which was disappointing). Usually, with most of these people, we're all on the same page. And then they have a kid, explaining it as "well, we're only having the one," apparently totally oblivious to any inkling of the maths above. And then they have a second one, with the excuse "we're only having two, one to replace each parent," as if we actually want or need the parents replaced. (The other common yet moronic excuse for the second kid is that the first "needs a friend", as if the 7 billion potential friends who already exist count for nothing.) And then they spit out a third kid and all I can think is "Oh, fuck the fuck off, you selfish fucking fuckers!" But society tells me its rude to swear at people when they announce a pregnancy, so I usually restrain myself.

My point here is that there's a lot of irrational, instinct-driven hypocrissy around pregnancy and breeding, and we need to change what is socially acceptable to fix this. And I don't mean the swearing rules, I mean what is socially acceptable in terms of who should demand the right to breed and who we should be condemning when they choose to.

Whether we have formal pregnancy limit laws or vague social norms and mores on breeding, I think my bottom line is that it's important that we consider the global impact of the child's consumption on the world, and not only the local impact of the child's consumption on the child. From that point of view, the rich(er) giving the poor(er) shit because they had kids is clearly inappropriate, and instead the richest should be most worrying to us.

Incidentally, we can easily extend this line of thought to also cover non-human breeding. The environmental impact of the meat industry is massive, and there simply is no way to "fix" that with the current human population size. Even if you don't understand the individual-level animal rights arguments, it's just simple maths again to understand that X humans need Y plants to survive, while X humans need Z animals to survive, all of which will each need Y plants to stay alive until they get killed. And X.Y will always be smaller than X.Y.Z. But again, people** would rather insist that we breed more cows, more pigs, more sheep, more chickens, more gagh, anything at all, regardless of the costs, rather than admit that we can get by fine without eating meat. And this has the further effect of pushing up the value of S for no good reason, which adds to how much the P population gets fucked.

*Increasingly, it's become fewer friends and more acquaintances. People take this stuff incredibly, deeply personally. I've had conversations with otherwise reasonable, easy-going people who take my suggestion that a hypothetical person should hypothetically choose not to have any children, and somehow twist that through parental animal instinct into believing I've said we should take their actual, current, already-born children away from them, to roast them and eat them. And I only slightly exaggerate that interpretation. Obviously, those humans who already exist should be treated as well and fairly as possible (speaking as a human who already exists), but that's a totally separate question from whether we should, in principle, tolerate careless breeding and population growth before it's happened, in the planning stages. I guess people also don't like admitting they've made irreversable mistakes, especially on that scale.

**People take meat-eating almost as personally as breeding. It's weird.