Part of the book is that everything is slower, it took them weeks to get to the planet from where they met, and Rocky had already spent time retro fitting graces ship to let him live there. (they did not go to the planet with the intention of sampling it, they were just going to sample the line and orbit the planet as an easy way to get close to the line)

It’s been a long time since I read the book, but I think they considered the danger relatively low for the ship with their plan to stay high up and were more focused on “maybe we’ll lose the bucket risks” and didn’t want to go back to rocky ship until they were done because travel time and stuff.

The trouble is just volume and time, even just reading through the description and “proof it works” would take a few minutes, and if you’re getting 10s of these a day it can easily eat up time to find the ones worth reviewing. (and these volunteers are working in their free time after a normal work day, so wasting 15 or 30 minutes out of the volunteers one or two hours of work is throwing away a lot of time.

Plus, when volunteering is annoying the volunteers stop showing up which kills projects

Your system does sound more straightforward.

Unfortunately various groups have historically opposed changes to make it simplier in the us ( some for dumb reasons some for valid reasons).

The main issue is almost all our documents are effectively voluntary…

Birth certificate is the one you’re most likely to have, managed by the state (people who don’t give birth in hospitals sometimes skip this, which makes everything harder in life)

The parents should also file for a federal social security card using the birth certificate, but again some people skip this and it makes their kids lives hard.

Most people who can drive will get a state issued drivers license at 16, the most recent standard has a label to identify if you are a citizen or not (proven by showing your birth certificate or social security card when getting the id)

All male citizens are required to register with the government at 18 for the draft, but I don’t recall getting any id from it - but mentioning it as the only time I think citizens are required to do something for the feds because they are citizens, the other mandatory federal item is paying taxes, but residents also pay taxes.

If you want to vote you register with the city / county, prove citizenship to them, and get issued a voter id, and about half the country doesn’t do this.

I don’t know the exact percent, but most Americans don’t have a passport. Traveling between States is cheaper than internationally, and within a half day or day long flight you can reach whatever vacation activity you’d want.

There are a bunch of less common id cards granted by state governments, such as weapon carry ids, hunting permits, a dedicated state id card, etc. But these aren’t standardized and not every state accepts other state ids fully (in particular the weapon permits are often not accepted). And a common issue comes up when voting laws require id because the politicians often will choose ids that their voters already have and hope enough opposition doesn’t get that form by the election to make the election easier (North Carolina Republican party lost a lawsuit recently because there were emails where they specifically asked which ids their voters were more likely to have then tried to make only those the accepted ids).

In practice the federal government uses the social security number as a federal id, but it’s a terrible bad idea that has caused many issues and we passed a law requiring government agencies stop doing it

I wish it was simplier, but most people don’t care and any discussion of changing it has people panic that their id won’t be valid for an upgrade, fearing they would have to spend a frustrating amount of time and money finding or replacing their original birth certificate in order to get a federal id or deal with a slow process (I’ve known people who had to wait in line multiple work days to get state ids issued, although that was rare, I only stood in line 2 hours).

Probably more information than you wanted, but it’s complex and I just kept going lol