One oddity about the Eldraeverse is the prevalence of contacted sophont civilizations at a relatively young stage of development, not so low and undeveloped as to not be sophont but not so advanced as to be godlike. That’s a fairly narrow window yet the species the Eldrae encounter seem to be consistently within it, always avoiding the apes or angels paradox. This seems quite improbable. Almost like there is something influencing chance, suppressing the rise of civilization beyond a certain point in time recently past causing it to all sprout out at once, or alternatively that something is encouraging the emergence of civilization at the current era in history. Like here is a device or mechanism affecting probability itself. Something like a probability… kiln, yes that’s a good word, probability kiln that is changing the odds of certain things happening to ensure that an extremely unlikely scenario comes true.
So if there is a probability kiln influencing the natural probability distribution of civilizations arising, there could be a variety of reasons. Like say a technologically advanced precursor race retroactively suppressing the existence of competing civilizations until they disappeared mysteriously and stopped maintaining the probability kiln. Or a future of say, psychologically weird libertarian space elves who conquered reality to spitball something absurd, decided to retroactively influence their past for some ineffable transcendental reason. Or maybe someone billions of lightyears away decided to play with the universe’s timeline and the Starfall Arc just happened to be within the blast radius of their experiments.
It’s hard to know since this time of temporal interference would be something beyond standard causality, something that could be described as paracau- wait no that word’s already used for something else. Metacausal? Transcausal? Something-causal whatever the proper term is, something that whatever the point in the timeline could affect the past, present, and future. Now this is all speculation of course. But it would explain why the Eldrae live in a universe that is neither empty nor dominated by godlike beings, instead being populated by approximate peers. Something made sure that the first two possibilities were causally inconsistent, and due to Novikov’s self consistency principle had their probability of existing be zero.
Or, there was some civilization just prior that wiped the board in spectacular fashion while being living examples of exactly the sort of probability kiln you just described.
Well in the Block Universe sense it’s impossible to change the timeline or for it to have ever been changed. But in the multiversal messing with the the anthropic principle sense couldn’t you make an extremely reliable paradox-inducing machine and tell it “this is a list of conditions describing how I want the universe to be, if you ever detect anything violating these conditions you are to immediately activate and cause a paradox thus rendering any timelines where the universe isn’t what I want it to be nonexistent and never existent, leaving only the timelines which I am satisfied with and those where you malfunction through extremely improbable circumstance which you are explicitly designed not to do” and have one of those conditions be “I wish that no other potentially competing forms of intelligent life arise during or before my civilization’s duration of existence” thus whatever-causally retroactively suppressing the chance of intelligent life resulting in spacefaring civilization arises? Something like a device that exploits worldline-pruning as described in the original probability kiln post? Or am I misunderstanding that post, your reply, and/or how temporal (meta)physics works in general?
The essence of the Fermi Paradox is “there should be a lot of civilisations in the galaxy, so why can’t we see them?”
For Earth, in the Eldraeverse? It’s mostly a threefold answer:
A combination of Precursor fuckup and (if I recall correctly) a local supernova bubble means our precise area was ‘reset’, and there’s no truly ancient widespread civs to have run into us
The density of intelligent life is a touch lower than Fermi calculated, so it’s not really something you detect until you’re at least a multiplanet civ, and many find it when they hit the tech to start poking around at nearby stars, and
There’s an inconvenient dust cloud between us and the biggest local concentration of signals, which means we can’t spot them yet and the neighbours haven’t realised we’re here either
(That would be the pulsar primary of the Mírlan (Imperial Core) system, which in the modern day serves primarily as the zero reference for Imperial galactographic coordinates.
300 million years ago, on the other hand, it was the spicy supernova responsible for lightly dusting many proplyds in the region with heavy elements and power metals - in addition to clearing the deck quite dramatically.)
Thinking a bit more about it, isn’t what I’m proposing the Precursors (or maybe a civilization before the precursors or so distant spatially that “before” and “after” are ambiguous and dependent on the reference frame that for something with spacelike separation from the Starfall Arc that precise unambiguous chronology is hard to define) using a probability manipulating device to get rid of potential competing species beasically what the Exterminomachy tried to do? Get rid of competing civilizations by making themselves the reason competing civilizations didn’t exist. Except where they tried to use berserker probes to do it manually the Precursors (or maybe someone else) did it by using a probability kiln to reduce the amount of possible universes where competitors existed to that of measure zero or as close to it as they practically can, thus boosting the probability of existing in timelines with no competitors by reducing the proportion of timelines where that isn’t true. Messing with the anthropic principle by making worlds which they don’t like impossible, thus leaving only the timelines they are satisfied with.
Three hundred million years? That’s more than a full rotation of the entire Starfall Arc! Surely stellar drift would have scattered the affected systems by now?
(Or is it a typo? Thirty million years would still have some drift effects, but plenty of systems would still be within the light-cone of the Worlds.)
Again, the lin-aman did things like that intrinsically, subconsciously, and reflexively. However, it also reminds me of what wide-scale deployment of the Genesis Project would have looked like, or the tillers of Asimov and Brin’s Foundation’s Triumph. In both cases, while acting as berserkers was not the purpose, the effects were much the same: wiping out native biospheres’ distinctiveness in favor of rubber-stamp copies of a single biosphere. In extreme cases, such as the All in Florschutz’ UNSEC trilogy, the concepts of berserker and heggie swarm become indistinguishable.
Why, you might almost think that they were, or were most of, a gravitationally bound open stellar cluster, or the remaining most or core of one, mightn’t you?
Ah, and even those that were lost to this “region” dozens or low dodecens of light years across might still be within the light cone of a stargate plexus stretching out dodeciads.
This demonstrates the value of volume descriptors measured by physical, rather than topological, space.