For this, the three Great Voyage Organizations had spent a full three hundred thousand years preparing.
During that time, aside from the routine task of laying the Star Path, every civilization had been doing one thing-conducting specialized research and experiments.
As for what they specialized in, naturally, it was research into the service life of their civilizations' technological equipment and the cost of maintaining it.
That encompassed a great many things.
For example, assessing the lifespan of their technological creations, studying individual life forms' energy consumption and long-term hibernation, evaluating equipment maintenance, and so on and so forth.
Every performance metric pointed toward longevity.
And all of this research could be summed up in a single word: entropy!
The three Great Voyage Organizations comprised 515 level six civilizations, including quite a few that had existed for over a hundred million years-far longer than 17.3 million years. Since they could survive for so long, why should they fear a mere 17.3 million years?
The reason was simple: increasing entropy.
In the past, these civilizations had existed on the condition that they exchanged energy with the outside world. They lived in star systems containing all manner of energy sources. These sources were low-entropy entities, and by exchanging energy with them, the civilizations kept their own entropy from increasing.
But that would no longer work once they entered the Great Void. The moment they set sail, the civilizations would lose every means of obtaining low-entropy energy. At that point, each civilization-or the three Great Voyage Organizations as a whole-would effectively become an isolated system.
Without an influx of low-entropy energy, this isolated system would gradually die as its entropy increased.
What the three Great Voyage Organizations needed to do was use technology to slow that process. Thus, their three hundred thousand years of