Many factors restricted the continuous progress and development of human technology, but the three main points remained unavoidable.
First was the technological barrier.
This did not simply mean that research in a certain material or discipline reached its limit and could not break through without extraterrestrial help. Instead, it meant that the vast amount of prerequisite knowledge became too overwhelming for humans to bear, making deeper research impossible.
To use a simple example, if civilization reverted to the basin's current Stone Age, it only took a hundred hardworking and intelligent people to drive the progress of civilization's technology and productivity.
These hundred individuals simply needed to learn how to forge stone tools, build houses, and hunt, before innovating upon that foundation.
Spawning these hundred people did not prove difficult either; a maximum population of a million sufficed.
