Octopuses are an interesting argument against this view. Octopuses do not directly control their own arms. And their arms even have reflex reactions completely independent of their brain. In other words, it may be that nature itself discovered centralization is a pretty bad idea beyond a certain scale.

In other words, the universe is Cthulhu?

To be fair, this is with our current understanding of physics. The SoL barrier is VERY unlikely to be 'broken', however, more interesting things may crop up. I mean, 'dark matter' is ~20% of the universe and all we really know about it is that it falls down. Then you have 'dark energy' which makes up ~70% of the universe and all we know about it is that it makes other things not fall down (maybe).

There is a whole heck of a lot of physics out there still so I think calling a galaxy-wide intelligence impossible is premature (let alone the debate over what 'intelligence' is counted as).

>> Latency...

That shouldn't be a problem if the quantum particles are entangled. right?

>> which reassures us that the answer to such a question would inevitably be "no

The Universe doesn't care about such laws ;)

You still can't move information faster than light.

Curious about this, is there some sort of study I can read?

I am not a physicist, but as I understand it this is a basic law of physics, and is a consequence of relativity.

> It is not possible, however, to use this effect to transmit classical information at faster-than-light speeds [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

unless maybe you are super intlligent and found new physics

This is a very anthropocentric view of intelligence.

What's to say that the universe doesn't simply operate on vastly different timescales?

I am sure you are aware of the paradoxical article "are stories that have a question mark in their title always wrong?"

no.