Singularity One Book Four Green the Unstoppable March of Technological Progress

What is life without joie de vivre?
After a long series of adventures, the Firefly team settled on a cluster of 130 natural planets in a relatively well-populated part of the Cosmos, no more than one thousand light years from Sol, but difficult to see from Earth. Wil remained their much revered leader, basking in the glory due a leader whose palpable charisma, beneficently employed, had brought three millennia of almost totally uninterrupted peace, in an empire the like of which had never been seen by any species, and the hitherto undreamt of stability and prosperity that came with that. The first few centuries of life on the cluster passed quickly, as the early waves of foolhardy but courageous volunteer settlers, a mere handful of millions of them, enthusiastically busied themselves with matters such as establishing peaceful cooperative relationships with the roughly twenty million indigenes.