Editing Journal of an Alien Diplomat (section)

===Entry Fifteen===
What in the world are these humans doing without their own FTL drives?! I returned from a ten-day tour of their homeworld today, and I can say with certainty that I have never been more unnerved. These humans possess, I knew, massive space stations, tightly packed with their own, and their non-Earth colonies were barely at the level where abundant food could be harvested. I had made, naturally, the same assumption that the Ambassador did when we saw these places: that these were criminals being made to suffer, or volunteers who chose to live in these awful conditions because they had literally no choice, or the infirm and weak, who could be sheltered in a completely artificial environment because their homeworld was too harsh for them in some way. What I discovered is that Earth is, if anything, nearly as badly overpopulated in its capitals and trade hubs as it is in their colonies and space stations! I saw towers of apartments, some with over two thousand people living in them, stacked so close together they looked like rows of molecules in a crystal, and the people there seemed as if this was the norm! The leaders and visionaries and great speakers of humanity spoke and feted and recited prepared lines, but I heard none of it. These people are not a people in true squalor, not really, certainly not by their own standards, but I hear tell of truly shocking slums in the cities of the poorer continents. It seems a disparity of wealth and power exists here, and I am unnerved deeply. A population this large achieving the great works of their peoples, like the ore haulers and orbital platforms, is not impossible…but only a tiny fraction of their people are wealthy enough to have done it. A small percentage…without FTL.