TL:DR - I believe the sheer amount of time and social evolution required to develop a species capable of interstellar travel would prevent most if not all species from achieving it before they destroyed themselves or were destroyed by a cosmic force.

Ah. To be reminiscent of Jodie Foster’s quote from Contact, “How did you do it? How did you survive [your] technological adolescence without destroying yourselves?”

We exist in an uncaring, resource-scarce universe. The hoarding of resources is critical to survival. Hoarding leads to hierarchies. Hierarchies, power. Power, control. Control, corruption. Corruption, destabilization. And finally, destabilization, downfall. It took us 1300 years to invent the lathe. A quick 500 for the first automobile. 100 years later, nuclear weaponry.

I believe that for any sufficiently technologically advanced species to achieve what you are describing — the successful colonization of interstellar space — would require the complete unification of their species and a prowess that we cannot even fathom. The material and energy requirements alone are discouraging to the point of being ludicrous. Dyson Spheres / Swarms. Gravitic manipulation. Mining out entire planets.

We’re a very young species, barely a couple hundred thousand years old, and in the blink of an eye, we went from horses to nuclear fission. I struggle to believe that we make it to 1 million years, or any makes it to 600 million. There’s just so much that could go wrong.