The glories and obstacles of the past are just a speck compared to the vastness of the future. - Liu Cixin

Mind you, what we are discussing isn’t religion, per se, but religious feeling. This isn’t the feeling someone has toward God—it’s atheistic, and not in the complicated way of Spinoza or whomever. The religious feeling of science fiction is a deep sense of awe at the great mysteries of the universe.

Humanity is a dewdrop on the great tree of the universe. During its brief life span, it absolutely cannot perceive the maturing of the great tree.

Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. The mathematical structure of cosmic sociology is far clearer than that of human sociology. The factors of chaos and randomness in the complex makeups of every civilized society in the universe get filtered out by the immense distance, so those civilizations can act as reference points that are relatively easy to manipulate mathematically. First: Survival is the primary need of civilization. Second: Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. One more thing: To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts: chains of suspicion and the technological explosion.