--- Bizarro7@aol.com wrote: >

The existence of 'siblings' could merely mean that the two of you came out of the same test tube batch. As for Jenna, Hal Mellanby and Ushton, it's probably significant that all three (plus Tyce) came from off-world. Perhaps the whole thing is confined to Earth, and isn't practiced on colony worlds.

Jenna's planet of origin isn't stated but her remark in Pressure Point about waiting for a long time implies that Earth is home. Blake is a native of Earth which makes it likely that Ushton was. Dayna explicitly states that she comes from Earth. Oh, and I just remembered Kasabi's daughter :)

<< A lot of the environments that we saw were not really the sort of place you'd expect to see children - The London, the planet of the lost, the bases on Saurian Major and Centero, Space Command HQ, Star One, The Thaarn's artificial black hole, Malodaar... again, those are just the ones off the top of my head.<<

True. But there were other places where children *would* have been appropriate, and we saw none.

Hmm, there are definitely episodes where we don't see children and might expect to. The only two I can think of which were Federation planets were Earth in "The Way Back" and Helotrix in "Traitor". I suppose that the children on Earth were all tucked up in bed when Blake met Ravella (It was dark outside) and the children in Traitor were in school or something and therefore excused attendance at the census. The really glaring ommissions are the village in "Deliverance" and The people who troop through the teleport terminal in "City". Playing the game you could argue that the radiation on Cephlon gave the savages a low birth rate and that when Norl talks about the "need that grew inside us blocked out all other needs" the genetic information telling them that the travel terminal was open for business affected their fertility rate. Somehow.

Actually, your example might be proof otherwise; that Servalan knew that the best way to bypass a Federation system that forbade its citizens individual, natural birth was to cheat and have her eggs extracted and fertilized off-world, where the rules were different.

What is it Forres says "There's one law for the rich and no law at all for the rich personal friends of the President". If I was director of a fertility clinic and the President of the Federation popped in for treatment I might hesitate to point out that what she was doing was illegal !

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FWIW I don't think there were any real pressures

for the Federation to control fertility as the surplus population could always be shipped off to found another colony.<<

If nothing else, we learned that the Federation was into control. They didn't even want their citizens leaving the domes, much easily emigrating. I imagine they had a good deal of control over that process, too. Pirates and aliens exempted, of course. And oh yes, rebels who steal bloody big ships and run away.

I agree that the Federation were into control. However there's a difference for letting people push off and found a new society like the English did to the Pilgrim Fathers and letting people go to a new planet having set up the regime there first. I suspect that you had to be a good party member and keep your nose clean to be considered.

The other argument that occurs to me about the sterility or not of the inhabitants of earth is the colonists on Cygnus Alpha. Given that leadership in that society was hereditary it seems likely that the people sent there were fertile - at least when the colony began.

Stephen.

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