Honestly, the idea of a coherent starfaring civilization is itself kind of dubious to me based on the following things: IMO, biological corporeal from for int

Honestly, the idea of a coherent starfaring civilization is itself kind of dubious to me based on the following things: IMO, biological corporeal from for intelligence is not a longterm solution. Bodies are good at what the things they evolved to do and interstellar travel aint one of those things. Now downloading your consciousness onto a robot/computer/swam on the other hand is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more robust against all manner of failures and threats and really opens up the door for interstellar travel. HOWEVER.... Assume speed of light is an absolute limit. This means even short hops between stars take a really long time. This doesn't really get much better with increasing technology either, because the amount of computation and evolution we would expect for a sentient robot swarm likely increases faster or at least at the same rate to where, in relative time, it's probably always going to be long and expensive in terms of energy. Even worse... take two "individuals" within this civilization and separate them for 100 years, which is not an unreasonable estimate for interstellar travel. They will be separated for far longer in practical computation time and are likely to evolve substantially without a lot of communication over that time. They will be so different as to not even be the same kind by the time they rejoin. So any semblance of stability for a galactic civilization is such a massively unlikely assumption in my mind. Instead individuals are likely to be in competition with each other. This produces an incentive to prevent such travel from occurring to begin with.