Probabilistic Distribution

Survival was civilization's foremost need—only by continuing could everything else have meaning.

This was true of the Hui Civilization, and it was true of those civilizations far older than the Hui Civilization, some of which had been born in the early days of the Big Bang.

For civilizations unwilling to abide by the laws of survival had long since been swallowed by the river of cosmic history. After the great waves washed away the sand, only civilizations that placed their continued existence above all else remained.

The technology of these civilizations could practically be considered godlike. Even the Hui Civilization, whose technology surpassed Earth's by countless years, could only look up at them.

Yet they, too, had problems they could not solve: they could not completely avoid death—the death of a civilization.

Just like life, life existed in the world with death as its corresponding other side. Given unlimited time, life would someday die. It could not refuse death; all it could do was endlessly postpone its approaching demise.

Civilizations were the same. On some future day, for some reason, they would head toward extinction. The process might be sudden, or it might unfold gradually.

To avoid their own destruction, these ancient cosmic civilizations began studying the extinction of civilizations. They believed that if they gathered enough information on civilization's destruction, they could avoid in advance the factors that would lead to their own demise—in simpler terms, they could learn from civilizations that had already perished.

However, after gathering information over spans measured in hundreds of millions of years, these ancient cosmic civilizations discovered something: within a limited region, the number of civilizations would not exceed a certain threshold.

This threshold varied with scale, but it always existed.

At first, no cosmic civilization paid attention to this, because they believed