Unsurprisingly with ~400 billion star systems, less than 0.01% have been explored.

If there were galactic empires like you see in science fiction, the amount of administration required to deal with that many systems would be mind boggling, the volumes of data would be staggering.

This point is why I find series like Dune or even aspects of Foundation implausible .

At the scale of interstellar empires machines are have to do most of the administration. You cannot centralize so much bureaucracy without computers involved .

I understand the need for science fiction to focus on the human drama, but trying to have empires and be anti-machines is unrealistic.

In the Foundation series the old empire's central planet Trantor was just one giant city that did almost nothing but administrate the empire.