Calamities explained

[Jandor]

Having done a small amount of project management myself, this is the most unbelievable part of the universe of XIV. That a project could be so well organized that the only failures were brought about by incomplete information on the first attempt, and direct intervention on the most recent, and the other 7 all happened perfectly.

I'm just guessing here, but I suspect the amount of time they have available to line these things up and get them right is fairly generous.

It all feels very fast from our perspective, but it has been something like a hundred years on the First IIRC, and the First didn't seem to show any real signs of fixing itself when we got there, even given that large passage of time.

Presumably if we had come up with some way of stopping the Empire that didn't involve traveling to other dimensions, then the Ascians could have just kept the First in that state till they came up with some other plan on the Source to trigger the calamity.