Perdition writes:
..distance and time become extremely limiting factors.
Actually, some scifi writers have tackled this problem by coming up with an advance civilization that got too lonely and so built wormholes all over the place while playing around with life on a kazillion planets to have intelligence develop at relatively the same time so that there'd be a community of intelligent races all over the universe. I read a couple stories like this many years ago but can't for the life of me remember the title or the author.
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