My guess, and it is only a guess, is that any civilization that could colonize the galaxy dies off from easily preventable problems.<p>They fail to prevent these easily preventable problems because their equivalent of copyright lawyers and ego-driven (r)eddit moderators delete every public posting of the solutions to their problems.<p>These solutions are independently developed and posted thousands of times, but they are always deleted or shadow-banned.<p>The negative effects of deleting solutions are exacerbated by the malicious destruction of the reputations of the authors of the solutions.<p>This leads to a society where cruel backstabbers get promoted while solution finding engineers are ground down.<p>Imagine a world where an Elon Musk (minus the showmanship) is only worth minimum wage while a guy whose only contribution is to complain about imagined grievances and sabotage his coworkers gets promoted to CEO.