This is pretty similar to what is described in Stanisław Lem's "The New Cosmogony" (a work of fiction, included in the book "A Perfect Vacuum"). Only there the

This is pretty similar to what is described in Stanisław Lem's "The New Cosmogony" (a work of fiction, included in the book "A Perfect Vacuum"). Only there the terrarium-like isolation of intelligent species is a self-imposed restriction: The earliest civilisations of the cosmos engineered the laws of physics that way.