Why would a civilisation choose to inhabit a single enormous vessel instead of maintaining interstellar colonies?
The setting: Very distant future, Earth is long gone/forgotten/just not around anymore. Humanity, whatever it may consist of (people, AI, something in-between) inhabits a single vast generation ship that roams the stars with no fixed destination, using material from the star systems it arrives at to refuel, expand, and do whatever else. They don't stay though, once they're done in a system they just pack up and leave.
Not allowing FTL travel in this universe would be my first guess, but I feel that even then it would be possible to at least retain casual contact between systems up to a couple dozen lightyears away, on a "let's sort it out before the colonists leave" basis.
My question is why might this be the way a civilisation exists as opposed to maintaining an interstellar group of colonies?
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The ship started out as a generational ship to colonize some far-away planet. However, when approaching that planet, nobody wanted to be a colonist. They lived on the ship, their parents lived on the ship, their grandparents lived on the ship. Indeed, some even doubted the historical record and claimed that no one ever had lived on the surface of a planet, that it was far to dangerous to try, with all that uncontrolled weather, volcanism, and so on. And even assuming that Earth existed (nobody alive remembered any communication from Earth anyway), what could the people there do about it if the colonists simply didn't colonize, but keep on the ship?
However they did face one problem: Population growth. But they didn't have the facilities to build a new ship (after all, the ship was not intended for that; the necessary facilities would have been built on the planet after colonization), so they decided to just add some sections to the existing ship. They kept orbiting the destination sun, as it provided them with energy, and harvested asteroids as those didn't have the gravity well cost.
As the ship grew, so did their skills and abilities, and over the course of a few hundred years, they indeed reached a level where they could build new ships directly. But the existing ship had developed so much that any newly built ship would have necessarily been a step back for any inhabitant. They developed decks with soil; there was definitely not enough soil to spare for a new ship to immediately copy that achievement. Building up new soil would need centuries. Also, building a new ship would have meant duplicating all the systems of a ship, the drive, the sensors, the main computer, while extending the ship meant just adding a bit to what already was there. So they added layer over layer to the ship, and after few generations they didn't even think about it any more; extending the ship was just the way they lived.
And extending got even easier over time, as the surface of the ship grew. So they ended up with a giant ship containing all of the known mankind. If Earth and its inhabitants still existed, nobody could say for sure (and actually, most were now convinced that it never had existed, that it was a myth from those people millennia ago).
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