With the Galactic Empire in fatal decline, Hari Seldon, inventor of the science of psychohistory, predicted a 30,000 year interregnum of barbaric dark ages until the rise of a New Empire. So Seldon created a plan to shorten this interregnum from 30,000 years to 1,000 years. Seldon asked Las Zenow, chief librarian of the Library of Trantor to undertake a search to find a suitable planet, according to Seldon's criteria. Zenow, following a lengthy search, found Terminus, which had been uninhabited through the five centuries after its discovery. Seldon manipulated the authoritarian Commission of Public Safety that ruled the Empire to exile his project to Terminus. The founding population consisted of 100,000 especially healthy scientists, whose ostensible purpose was to publish an Encyclopedia Galactica. In actuality, their job would be to preserve science and technology, and to reconquer the Galaxy to form the Second Empire. The lack of steel and limited natural resources forced Terminians to develop technologies of extremely high efficiency, as their knowledge due to their position as the inheritors of the Imperial Library allowed them to do so.