That also might help explain the millions of people pulled off a planet per turn.
Hm... you know, that complaint about the transport minister sending a transport to a planet, waiting, loading population the next turn, waiting then going on to the nearest planet with <500 million people might just be realistic. It might very well take .3 years to get all those people loaded up onto a ship before you send it off.
I use the transport minister since it seems to be pretty good at spotting planets w/high population and low population. I just manually load/unload the ships usually and check it to keep it from depleting a small world w/1200M people. It's actually a bit faster than manually doing everything since I don't have to search around for a high population world.
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"What do -you- want?" "I'd like to live -just- long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this..." *waggle* "...can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"