"At least the universe isn't infinite and I don't have to figure out whether that means nothing actually matters."

Squeeze.

"Okay, no more moping. We should figure out how to randomly sample from Bar, that'd be useful."

"To what extent do you actually need statistics and to what extent would asking her for subjective impressions over the entire population, which apparently she can provide, do the trick?"

"The things I'm most interested in is 'share of worlds that are pre-industrial vs share of worlds that are industrial-but-not-spacefaring vs share of worlds that are modern or ahead of us', can you think of a way to get that off subjective impressions?"

"Hm... only if you think 'people who show up in the bar' might be a random sample, or at least from a random sample of worlds if you cut duplicates."

"Well, it's worth asking, but I'd like something more thorough than that eventually."

"Yeah. I wonder if people normally batch like we seem to be batching? Or if usually it's one-offs who don't particularly try to exploit the phenomenon, who show up and have lunch and meet some interesting strangers and go home..."

"Even if my world hadn't been at war I think I'd have been tempted to find an exploit... but maybe I wouldn't have stayed several subjective years, I guess."

"Yeah, if I didn't have specific extradimensional resource needs and Edie hadn't known people I knew..."

"Shall we head in and ask?"

"Sure."

So Bar is asked, of the people who come into Bar, what share of worlds are pre-industrial and what share are industrial-but-not-spacefaring and what share are modern or ahead of them and what share are not describable that way at all.

And her best estimate (allowing for her excellent but imperfect memory and after she has been assigned an alternative benchmark for civilizations that do not happen to exist in worlds that have space to fare and a digression about the extent to which magic which isn't "industrially" produced counts) is 30/40/25/5.

"And how many from worlds with convenient interdimensional transit?"

It is not too uncommon for worlds to exist with convenient or at least feasible interdimensional transit of some kind within a certain limited set of worlds. Summoning constitutes such a thing, for instance. Broader scope interdimensional transit, even untargeted, is nearly unheard of and if I recall correctly (which I may not) consistently magical in underlying nature.

"Huh. Thank you." And to Cam, "we'll pretty much lose a war with anyone modern-or-ahead-of-us, that's something to be careful of."

"If you allow it to play out like a war, yes, if you steal all their tech with demons and go guerilla tactics with magic not necessarily..."

"If we accidentally teach the portals to somebody who's got magic we can't copy and no reliable interdimensional transit..."

"Accidentally teach them?"

"My dads thought they could have the portals in forty years, the hard part's going to be having them unconjurable and not straightforward to reconstruct a conjurable version from. We don't want to be proof-of-concept for some other civilization that'd either given up on interdimensional travel or didn't even know there were dimensions to travel to."

"Yeah, true. And there could be forms of conjuration without demonic limitations."

"We'll just have to be careful. Or figure out how to do targeting well-enough to only hit the preindustrial places, they're where we probably make the biggest difference anyway except in unusual cases like Melkors."

"Preindustrial and no or low magic. Magic's a huge confounder."

"Though it'd be kind of nice to land some places with transmissible magic, have a lot more tools in our arsenal..."