The Sage and Dowry Leaderboards are designed to be incredibly volatile, with regular leader rotation.

Sage is pretty straightforward. It's every fertile alien in the game, ranked by time since their birth. In a future module there will be schools available that allow them to increase their 'sagacity' and educated aliens will start jumping ahead of non-educated aliens, but actual age will continue to be the dominant factor.

The dowry leaderboards are much more nuanced. When you build, 2/3 of the cost always goes into your dowry. When you get to top, you are selected as dowager and lose up to 2/3 of your dowry pool, resetting you much lower in the standings. On top of that, it prioritizes households with oldest fertile out of cooldown above oldest fertile in cooldown.

Any time you are selected as the sage, the baby shower gift (1/3 of the dowry pool from the dowager selected) goes into your dowry, so you can rocket ahead in the dowry rankings by being selected as the sage.

On top of that, every 'bend light' event participates in a progressive jackpot, and when it grows large enough its quite possible for the dowager to pay out 2/3 of their pool as baby shower gifts and still end up with a larger pool than they had going into it.

Needless to say, all that nuance creates a lot of opportunity for strategic positioning, with any player with fertile aliens in their household able to actively participate.

You do need fertile aliens to participate in the sage and dowager leaderboards, though. The cost to bend light may be a barrier for some players.