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I agree -- you either solve the problem of faster than light travel OR increase life span to virtual immortality to make a galactic empire feasible.

Now that I think about it, there's two problems: communications and force projection.

1) Communication times will render political adminstration of any "interstellar empire" impossible. Why send petitions to a distant ruler when you won't receive a timely reply? The local head-honcho on site will have to have considerable autonomy simply because of the problem with communications. He/She/It won't be able to call for outside help or advice, since by the time a reply makes it out there, years have passed, rendering the reply irrelevant.

2) Force projection: Say our local head-honcho decides to take over his/her/its turf. What can the "emperor" do about it? Due to communications, it'll take years before the "emperor" knows what's even going on. It'll take some more time to put together a force (assuming the "emperor" is completely starkers) to track our honcho down and hang him/her/it for their treason. Then it takes even more years to actually travel to the colony to go repossess it. Odds are, the forces sent to quell the insurrection will get chopped to pieces since the colony's had all that time to prepare a suitable welcome to outsiders, and the expedition can't exactly call for swift reinforcements. Of course, they could simply annihilate every inhabited portion of the planet/system, and send word back that some new property (slightly radioactive, perhaps?) is available.

Not much of a scalable "force spectrum", if you get my drift. Either do nothing, or flatten everything, with no in-between option like invasion and occupation.

Of course, biological, social, and political factors might mitigate this somewhat, but the problems only get worse with distance. End result is that a species may go hog-wild colonizing everything in sight, but no political organization will be in charge of anything beyond its own star system.

Since no political organization will benefit that much by sending off a lot of their loyal/troublesome citizens/subjects off into the void (it'd be simpler just to execute the dissidents), who else can do it? I believe that the only people that would have the motivation to leave everything they know behind and head off to parts unknown are those that have nothing to gain by staying home. Those dissident types (either political, religious, or those in any persecuted minority) may be the ones who have the reason to get away, but they probably wouldn't be able to pull it off unless they either got major backing or "acquired" the means to leave home.

As I said before, probably every civilization eventually evolves Democrats to hobble the rest of the population. :)

Perhaps we are merely quarantined. Perhaps the rest of the universe does consist of life that is eternal, but because of the lack of our moral development, we cannot share in the technological treasures that have been developed in the millions of years the universe has had to evolve. Perhaps even occasionally the universe sends us a representative that demonstrates His powers and their hopes for us, and we crucify Him for that love. Perhaps with an act of will we can even download an antivirus that slowly begins to transform us into a being capable of living with the rest of the universe. Who knows what amazing technologies might exist with millions of years of development beyond our own?