As an omnipotent creator, other choices in physics and the arrangement of matter would have other drawbacks. The problem of invasive species destroying unique ecosystems on earth is widely recognized, and if you were designing a universe where interstellar travel was easier, then the scale of the problem would increase.
That's a limiting factor in our current form factor. We so far have yet to identify a similar physics-bound reason preventing us from transferring consciousness and identity to a different substrate, or even a computing substrate for that matter. Admittedly, we still are in the very early stages establishing exactly what consciousness and identity are, so it is premature to claim that we can perform the transfer in the future. The most we can assert at this moment is based upon the laws of physics as we know them today, we can hold out more hope for transference than breaking c.
Similarly, we are not aware of any physics-based reason that prevent the design, construction and maintenance of computing substrates that renew themselves over billions of years. There are certainly political, cultural, social, even energy limitations, but nothing quite as hard as the c limit.
So theoretically, we can hope to even in this reality to eventually create versions of our selves that reside in computing substrates and "wake up" for "interesting" events along a multi-million year journey. Perhaps they run in a low-power mode, where 1 day in real universe == 1 second in the substrate. In that context, even if we never go faster in that future than our current technology's Juno space probe, a trip to Alpha Centauri is "only" 17,785.27 years, or 12.35 years subjective substrate time, enough to get excited about and study the torrent of increasingly-fine-grained data pouring in from the real world about the destination.
If the galaxy is relatively teeming with these compute substrate hibernation ships, then that presents interesting possible resolutions to the Fermi Paradox: what we are doing today on Earth is not "interesting" enough to the automation on these alien ships, or we are deemed interesting, but even the nearest ship within our light/EM cone is still thousands to tens of thousands of years away.
It gets even more interesting if we figure out how to "decant" substrate consciousnesses into physical bodies.
Even at that glacially-slow crawl of the Juno space probe, it would still take "only" 383,551,218 years to traverse the Milky Way's 100,000 light years. Put up against the ~13 billion years of the Milky Way's existence, that means spreading across the Milky Way is still within the realm of not-ruled-out-by-physics.
Even if you could transfer your consciousness into an immortal machine and stick it on a starship, if it takes billions of years to traverse the galaxy because the ship is so slow, that just isn't that practical: by the time you get to a far-away star system, the star might have gone nova, the planet you wanted to see destroyed somehow, the lifeforms there killed themselves in a nuclear war, etc. The milky way galaxy alone has changed a good amount in the last few billion years: Earth certainly didn't look anything like it does now 4 billion years ago. If it takes you that long to get anywhere, it'll really limit what you can see: you'll be facing the heat-death of the universe before you've gotten out of the galaxy. I see your estimate about Juno's speed, but remember, if you're actually trying to explore the galaxy, you aren't just going from point A to point B, you're going to take a very long, circuitous route so you can see lots of star systems. There's ~400M stars in this one galaxy alone; how long would it take a Juno-speed starship to see even half of those? As an analogy, it only takes me 3-4 days to drive from the east coast to California, but if I want to see every city of at least 25k people between here and there, it's going to be a much, much, much longer trip.
That's not that useful. It's great for looking back in time to see the origins of the universe, but if you want to communicate with someone on a planet 100 light-years away, that's a 200-year round-trip latency. And telescopes will likely never be powerful enough to see, for instance, the actual inhabitants of another planet (we'd be lucky if we could see some gigantic Death Star-sized space station optically).
>And telescopes will likely never be powerful enough to see, for instance, the actual inhabitants of another planet (we'd be lucky if we could see some gigantic Death Star-sized space station optically).
gravitational lensing by Sun, just need to put the telescope at least 550 AU from the Sun.
"And using the Sun as a lens would result in much greater magnification. Instead of a single pixel or two, astronomers would get images of 1,000 x 1,000 pixels from exoplanets 30 parsecs, or about 100 light years, away. That translates to a resolution of about 10 kilometers on the planet’s surface, better than what the Hubble Space Telescope can see on Mars, which would allow us to make out continents and other surface features."
To the GGP point of light speed limit - that is only true for static fixed spacetime. The spacetime expansion/contraction doesn't seem to have that limit (this is how we have far-far galaxies receding from us at the speeds higher than c). Just an issue of engineering that into a practical drive ...
By definition, if we can extend our lifespans long enough for a person to travel 100 light years, we can wait the 100 years it takes for a signal to arrive.
You're not going to have a very good conversation with a 200-year latency. A normal conversation requires many messages on both sides. 1 year isn't that much of a human lifespan, but if we tried to hold a conversation with a 1-year round-trip latency, it's not going to be a very good conversation; it's just too long between messages. But if you just want to blast them with a ton of information all at once (like sending them a bunch of video archives and a copy of Wikipedia, for instance), that's doable, but it's not a conversation.
