You've got a point. But I think the major issue is not whether or not the universe is simple enough that someday we'll understand it all perfectly. It's not unreasonable that the universe is so complicated and so big that we'll never be able to undersand all of it in detail. We are also a subset of the universe, made up of its matter and energy and answering to its physical laws, is it likely we'll be able to understand it in all its complexity when we make up such a small part of it? So far our mathematics has been a very useful tool, but are we assured all physical problems are amenable to mathematical analysis? Math may have its limits, as does language.

If math and language have limits, perhaps our tool making ability has limits too. For example, we understand solar fusion fairly well, but we can't build reactors capable of duplicating it because there are no materials capable of withstanding the conditions that occur inside stars. We may come up with work-arounds, but we can't know that for sure. Stars may be the only way to generate the temperatures and pressures necessary. We may be able to understand precisely the biochemistry of life, but will we ever have the nanotools necessary to build up complex molecules from scratch? There may be a whole class of processes and objects which can easily occur in nature, and which we may understand perfectly, but which only can be created by random natural processes.

You and I may understand exactly how a TV set works, but could we build one from scratch using only stone tools? And I'm not even including the necessary infrastructure, power grids, transmitters, and the administrative, organizational and financial resources needed to make TV happen. I submit that as our knowledge and capabilities grow the infrastructure and overhead costs needed to build really big projects grows even faster, always out of our reach. After an initial period of explosive growth, which we are lucky enough to be living in, friction the law of diminishing returns may set in. The big jump in our technical capabilities over the last few hundred years is only a blip in our history, we have no guarantee it will continue indefinitely. Maybe we've been so successful only because we've been working on the easy problems. The really hard stuff may still be in the future.

And there's always a question of motivation. The Romans and Chinese had technically sophisticated civilizations, but they never developed a rigorous scientific method that would allow them to transcend the rule-of-thumb technologies they developed. Will other civilizations, or even our own, seek to push back the boundaries of knowledge once their own comfort and security concerns are satisfied? Civilization may be able to advance to the point where it is capable of affecting events on a galactic scale, but the big question is will it necessarily do so? Even today, we can see that civilization is becoming more and more hesitant about committing resources and investing in really long term projects with high-risk payoffs in the distant future. We may lose interest long before we run out of smarts.