[DarkTree]

One of the comments at the bottom of the post points out what I believe to be a likely scenario:

"As we develop VR tech that allows us to simulate any world we desire, recreational or purpose driven, there is less and less reason to explore the rest of the universe."

Using humanity as a example for how intelligent life advances, we can look at the developed nations. The develop nations are the ones who would create any sort of technology that would get us out of the solar system and into contact with other life. Most, if not all developed nations are built through commercialization of products, with the citizens consuming those products. Only a very, very small portion of people are working on the advanced technology to take us elsewhere. So the majority of our species are not advancing galactic technology, but they are becoming larger consumers of entertainment, at least on the scale since early civilizations. Keeping that in mind, we are also somewhat physically locked in our solar system due to the laws of physics, at least in the near term. So, to me it would seem much more likely that instead of advancing space tech to the point where we are sending robots to other planets to self-replicate and spread across the universe, that by that time we would have already perfected VR and that our entertainment-based population would be well-satisfied simply living in our perfect little VR worlds. The two scenarios aren't mutually-exclusive. We are in fact advancing VR and building rockets for Mars as I write this, but I think it's also possible that simulating our reality could replace our desire to move outward. Since the universe is seemingly too far out of reach, we will just create our own here, for cheaper, sooner.

[qznc]

There seems to be a force which makes humans disperse. We settle on every part of this planet even in uncomfortable regions. Some people want to settle on Mars. (Curiously, nobody wants to live on our moon?)

There also is a force which makes humans cluster. Silicon Valley is the biggest cluster of IT and VC at the moment. Accelerando (by Charles Stross) describes vividly how an advanced AI civilisation still clusters (Mainly because solar/fusion power and communication speed).