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I'll throw out another theory, FWIW. What if it's exceedingly difficult for societies to organize on a large scale over an extended period of time? For a galaxy-spanning civilization, this would be a requirement for large-scale interstellar colonization.

Agreed. However, IMHO the distances alone will prevent an interstellar civilization.

Consider our own planet, we create extra-national organizations such as the UN and it becomes corrupted and ineffective. We've even tried international efforts on space projects and we have a clunky sinkhole of money in LEO that will never be completed as it was originally intended.

Agree also. Big sigh here. (And I even worked on the Space Station)

I haven't seen evidence that we're capable of mounting an expedition much past Mars. To think that we could not only colonize our own star system and then reach out on a large and continuous scale to propagate throughout the galaxy using a supranational organization (UN on steroids) is laughable.

I don't even seeing us going back to the moon any time soon, much less Mars or beyond. :-(

Maybe the best that could be attempted would be sporadic probes of a few nearby star systems, probably robotic, that would do a quick flyby or a temporary orbital surveillance of other star systems. It would be small scale, extremely rare, and very unlikely we would ever notice such a probe, even if it passed by during an age of technical sophistication of the target star system.

Would take lifetimes. Can a probe last this long? We have quite a time getting our probes just to the edge of our own solar system.