Depends on who you mean as "we". The speed of light isn't a speed limit. If you can create a ship that is capable of 1g acceleration, it doesn't just stop accelerating as it reaches the speed of light relative to some stationary object, like Earth. Instead you start getting relativistic effects and things start getting very weird with time and distance doing some funky stuff. You keep zooming along just fine from your perspective, but an at-rest observer on Earth would see your ship asymptotically approach the speed of light, but never exceed it. The universe is very weird. In any case you could viably travel billions of light years in a single human lifetime, but for an observer at rest billions of their years would genuinely pass. In other words, traveling into the future is very much a real thing, so far as our current understanding of the universe goes.

The search term on this is 'relativistic starship.' Here's [1] a calculator to see what the math works out to for a ship capable of accelerating at 1g indefinitely. So for instance you could travel to Andromeda, some 2 million light years away, in about 28 years. But 2 million years would really pass for those at relative rest, such as those on Earth. So if you came back, the humanity you found (if any) would be unimaginably different.

And this isn't some just some weird fringe theoretical/mathematical thing. For instance GPS satellites have to compensate for time dilation because relativistic effects would otherwise have a substantial effect. Another example is at things like the large hadron collider. As a convenient effect of relativistic effects, emergent unstable particles exist far longer than they 'normally' would before decaying due to the fact they're moving at relativistic rates.

[1] - http://www.convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator...

Even if FTL is achievable (which I agree, highly unlikely), it's still extraordinarily slow on cosmic scales. The closest star is a little over 4 ly away!

And probing the universe outside the Milky Way? Forget about it.

We are still so slow and have had space travel for so little time, we are almost certainly on the "wait" side of the wait equation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wait_Equation

The entire universe seems to be inside a giant black hole, anyway, and the more it goes, the more evidence is found to support that. Might as well find a black hole and visit other universes than explore our own.

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It would help if our science wasn’t distracted by things like global warming and nazi governments though. There are definitely ways we can help the process * right now *