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It doesn't have to be very fast, because geological timescales are so large.
Consider colonization of the milky way.
The width of the galaxy is 100,000 light years. Let's say some civilization travelled at .0001 the speed of light between stars (the fastest man made probe is travelling at .0005 the speed of light) . And on average they had to stop every light year to build up, grow crowded, and then expand outward again. These stops take them 1000 years.
It would take them 200 million years to colonize the galaxy if they started at the very edge. Which is a long time for an individual, but short on geological timescales. If Earth2 on the opposite side of the galaxy had dinosaurs with a space program at the same time we had dinosaurs, then they would have already arrived here before humans evolved.
Yeah, but you obtain that result only because you're limiting your consideration to the Milky Way. Why so provincial? There are superclusters out there! Geological timescales are large, but the universe is seemingly infinitely vast. The total wealth a future civilization will be able to claim depends entirely on when they start and how fast they expand.
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Yeah, this is pretty much what I'm getting at; the scale is so huge that everything kinda rounds off to irrelevance.
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