Ask Lemmy

Assuming a mechanism exists that changes the universe from being singly connected to multiply connected (i.e., wormholes exist), it is possible to have wormholes permitting faster-than-light travel without time paradoxes, though some additional restrictions may apply.

We have already shown that wormholes connect across both space and time, so that a trip between star systems could take you hundreds of years into the future, and the return trip takes you hundreds of years back in time. And this is even before we throw in how time slips between planets when considering relativistic time dilation due to different speeds and gravitational potentials.

Fortunately, all the weirdness of different time rates and going backward and forward in time can be ignored by the average person. This is because you never need to go from one world to another, or back, across the vast gulfs of interstellar space. You just take the wormhole between them. All you ever need to worry about is the coordinate frame that goes across the wormhole. When considering this reference frame, you're not hopping all over the place in time. If it takes ten minutes to cross the wormhole between the two planets, when you get to your destination world the clocks will read ten minutes later than they did when you left your departure world. By coordinating their time-keeping across the wormhole network, all of the worlds of the network can agree on a common time to coordinate their activities. This is all travelers ever need to worry about, and they can then ignore all the relativistic weirdness. Your network engineers will still need to keep track of relative time drift and how close a given configuration is getting to a time loop. But unless your protagonist is a network engineer, they can just ignore all that stuff. And, as an author, so can you! Assume your engineers are competent, you have good regulatory bodies and standards institutions, and don't worry about any of this "time travel" that doesn't actually let you cause paradoxes.

source: Galactic Library

I think the closest we will come is detecting radio signals from another species. But like obviously 2 way communication would be almost impossible due to sheer distance.

The very slow is the issue. Assuming we can reach 10-20% of c, we can reach a couple of nearby stars in 200 years (Wikipedia gives me 50 stars with 30 ly).

200 years is roughly the time from the Napoleonic era from today (Taking an Euro reference). Do you remember what your ancestor were doing during Napoleon Russian campaign or when US purchased Louisiana?

Society changed massively since Napoleon. Over 200 years the society culture of a generation ship would also drastically diverge from ours. Moreover, I can't think of many piece of technology which can keep working for 200 years without a few massive overall.

In theory yes... but the oldest frozen specimen of humans we've found is only a few thousand years old. We don't even know if long term cryogenic reanimation is possible.

Assuming the ship travels at 10x our current capabilities we're still looking at ~8,000 years to reach our closest stellar neighbour at only 5 lightyears away.

It makes interstellar travel plausible but not intergalactic.

You are talking about a trip that would last longer than human civilization has existed.

Sort of - but there is no reason to think we will ever be able to make something that won't break. Even intersellar is questionable just because the odds of the ship breaking in the time needed are too high.