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The Hegemony currently encompasses about <span class="mu-s">45 billion Jaxtians</span>. This incredible growth is partially due to the Indigo program, the massive increase if life expectancy, and the slow and steady colonization of your solar system.
Jaxt has been right on the cusp of overpopulation for years now- the Ingar <span class="mu-i">incident</span> really did push you over the edge. Xin was the Hegemony's only real escape plan- and projections had it only just being terraformed in time for a mass exodus. Emergency rations and patriotism will work for the short term, but in the long term, there is just no way to sustain your population with the damage done to your homeworld's ecology. Alavis intentionally damaged the most fertile and important parts of your ecosystem- flooding farmlands by overriding dam controls and acidifying others with chemical dumps. It is possible to heal most of it, or use soil enrichment to create new farmlands while abandoning old ones, but doing so will take time you don't have.
The simple truth is there are too many mouths to feed. The Hegemony is full of entertainers, artists, programmers, and high tech space radio operators. These people will always be back in line when you can't get enough food to feed everyone.
As the Supreme Ruler, you have to grapple with reality. The solutions to this problem aren't pretty.
The first is to begin supplementing food rations with biomass. Anything that can be processed- weeds, sewage, dead Jaxtians, pets, worms, algae... all spun up in industrial centrifuges and made into food cubes or biosludge. While your technicians assure you that this will be <span class="mu-i">100% safe</span> to consume, it is a bygone conclusion that one of the Alavis viruses will “leak” where this super food comes from. It is pointless to try and hide it- it will be massively unpopular. You exist in a position of privilege, and will never be forced to consume it, but the idea of eating it disgusts you. You'd be making everyone else eat it- possibly for decades or longer.
The second solution would be to increase the number of individuals being put into long term stasis. Order Schoon to produce a massive number, billions, of stasis pods and start storing excess population for later. Doing so would have a huge negative effect to your GDP- as those people won't be working or producing anything at all, only draining a negligible amount of power. Of course, the idea of keeping people in stasis for a century would be pretty unpopular too. They'd wake up to a totally different Supreme Ruler, all their friends and families dead or geriatric- you would have to bribe a lot of them to do it, plus the sheer cost of producing that many stasis pods would make it expensive.
The third and final solution is a good old fashioned purge- starting with the least desirable and moving up. Good for the eugenic program too. Massively unpopular, of course. We're stuck with bad and worse here.
>Biocube food rationing
>Mass Suspension (Expensive)
>Purge (Unpopular)
