>>10811883This is mostly true, but allow me to turn your argument upside down a little and shake out its lunch money.
Depression is a natural feature of organic intelligence in the cosmos as it leaves its biosphere. It responds by stoically reorganizing itself through technology, strengthening itself against cosmic isolation, and achieving whatever form is most adapted to maintaining intelligence while traveling vast distances under low acceleration.
Intelligence must adapt to travel under low acceleration because high acceleration will isolate itself even further from the rest of the universe through time dilation, robbing itself of computing time, and crippling its ability to develop. Really consider that for a moment. Intelligent matter cannot permit itself to accelerate to near light speed because it cannot afford making itself obsolete in the process.
Since intelligence is so new in the cosmos, it may be that it cannot adapt to interstellar travel and the physics of spacetime simply do not permit intelligence to exist cohesively at a given magnitude, the same way it doesn't permit fire to maintain itself in a vacuum or light to escape an event horizon and so on. What sense does it make to say that a culture can escape a solar system when its nodes are so far out of contact that they radically differentiate in the meantime?
A similar phenomenon might be observed on Earth on a smaller scale throughout history. Life spreads out, adapts, differentiates, and speciates. Cultures diversify and separate.
Intelligence will radically differentiate and separate if it manages to travel at all over such differences, but it can hardly be said to cohere or exist in any kind of organized way across such distances that would be recognizable to us as intelligent.
