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.